Daniel Dennett’s last interview: ‘AI could signal the end of human civilisation’

Do we still need philosophers? Daniel Dennett, who died last week, believed strongly that we do. ‘Scientists have a tendency to get down in the trenches and commit themselves to a particular school of thought,’ he told me from his home in Maine, not long before he died. ‘They’re caught in the trenches so a bird’s eye view can be very useful to them. Philosophers are good at bird’s eye views.’ Scientists of all sorts valued their conversations with him, ‘I think because I could ask them questions that they realised they should have had answers to,’ he said.

I grew up with Dennett. First, as a teenager, watching YouTube videos as he raged joyfully against the irrationalities of religion. Then, as an undergraduate, I came to his ideas about consciousness. He was perhaps best known as one of the four horsemen of the New Atheist movement – alongside Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris – and was there at the very beginning of cognitive science in the 1960s.