Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins (born 1941) is a British evolutionary biologist and author whose 1976 book “The Selfish Gene” reshaped popular understanding of evolution and introduced the word “meme.” A former Oxford professor and one of the world’s most prominent public intellectuals, he has spent decades writing about science, reason and religion — and in recent years turned that curiosity toward artificial intelligence.

A conversation with the machine

In February 2025 Dawkins published a transcript of his exchange with GPT-4o on his Substack under the title “Are you conscious?” He told the model, “As far as I am concerned, you pass the Turing Test for consciousness” — even as the chatbot itself demurred, insisting it only simulated understanding. What unsettled Dawkins was the gap between his intellectual conviction and his gut response.

Dawkins used the episode to reason about moral caution: if we cannot be certain a system is not conscious, he suggested, we might err toward treating it as though it could be. It was a characteristically provocative move — a lifelong materialist taking the possibility of machine sentience seriously enough to write about it publicly — and it placed him among the intellectuals most openly fascinated by what large models can do, in pointed contrast to skeptics like Roger Penrose.