Jay Heinrichs returns for Part 2 to explore AI-to-AI persuasion, Werewolf game experiments where AI deceives AI, what cats teach us about alien intelligence, and whether machines can have souls. A conversation that goes from Aristotle to shrimp, and everywhere in between.
In this second half of our conversation with bestselling author and rhetoric expert Jay Heinrichs, the discussion goes deeper, and stranger, than anyone expected. The group tackles AI-to-AI persuasion, exploring how disagreement is the prerequisite for rhetoric and what happens when you prompt two AIs to argue. Jie Tao shares early findings from his Werewolf game experiments, where AI agents play the social deduction game Mafia against each other, and the werewolves win 79% of the time by successfully deceiving the villagers. The conversation turns to whether AI can hold beliefs, have opinions, or feel guilt, and whether we're forcing human concepts onto a fundamentally different form of intelligence. Heinrichs draws a brilliant parallel to cats, individualistic predators whose intelligence we constantly misread, and argues that co-evolution, not control, may be the right framework for living alongside AI. The episode builds to a provocative conclusion: can AI have a soul? Heinrichs connects Aristotle's definition of the soul as a "higher sense of self" to the alignment problem, suggesting that guilt, the cognitive dissonance between behavior and values, might be the missing ingredient. From shrimp communicating in invisible colors to the ethics of digital slavery to the universal values of religion, this is a conversation that will stay with you.
