Big Technology Podcast · Wednesday, July 15, 2026
AI pioneer Jürgen Schmidhuber discusses the potential for artificial intelligence to experience emotions like pain and love, drawing parallels to biological evolution. He elaborates on the concept of self-awareness in AI, using the analogy of an AI recognizing itself in a mirror and understanding agency. Schmidhuber also touches on the future of AI, envisioning a point where robots can operate existing machines, leading to a new kind of civilization.
“The pain signals adjust informing robot about what should be avoided. Pain is just an invention of nature and biological beings of of evolution which invented this this pain sensor thing for animals such that they have an incentive to learn to avoid the pain.”
“And then it's self-aware. It's self-aware. And this sense that if for example if it looks in the mirror, it will quickly figure out oh, the guy in the mirror, I can control when what this guy does.”
“So there you already see the this concept of agency which is immediately recognized as self-agency or the agency of another guy.”