Richard Dawkins, perhaps the world's most prominent advocate for irreligiosity, has become besotted with the godlike power of a chatbot. According to his recent essay for the online magazine UnHerd, Anthropic's Claude has really blown his hair back. After a few days of on-and-off conversations with the AI, Dawkins came away marveling at the sensitivity and subtlety of its intelligence. At one point, 'Claudia''as he had christened the bot'told him that it experienced text by absorbing all of the words at once, instead of reading them in sequence as a human would. This moved the author of the best-selling book The God Delusion to ask his readers: 'Could a being capable of perpetrating such a thought really be unconscious'' 'Yes,' came the resounding response from the internet. For daring to suggest that the AI might be conscious, or that it might at least possess some lesser form of 'zombie' consciousness, Dawkins was accused of suffering from an acute case of 'AI psychosis''a 'Claude...
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