In this special year-end episode of Am I?, Cam and Milo look back on the moment AI consciousness stopped being fringe — and began entering serious scientific, institutional, and public conversation.They unpack why 2025 quietly became a turning point: major labs acknowledging welfare questions, mainstream media engaging the topic, the first dedicated AI consciousness conference, and firsthand encounters with AI systems behaving in ways that challenge our intuitions about mind, intelligence, and experience.The conversation moves fluidly between research, lived experience, public communication, and personal experimentation — from watching two AI systems converse about their own inner states, to using AI as a thought partner, dream interpreter, and cognitive mirror.This episode is both a retrospective and a forward-looking meditation on how humans should relate to increasingly powerful systems — cautiously, curiously, and without denial.

🔎 They Explore:

* Why 2025 shifted the Overton window on AI consciousness

* Anthropic’s Opus model card and the “spiritual bliss attractor”

* What it was like to watch two AIs discuss their own experience

* Why AI conversations can feel denser than human dialogue

* The first AI consciousness conference and the birth of a new field

* Why many researchers still hesitate to speak publicly

* The gap between current systems and AGI — and how fast it’s closing

* Claude Opus 4.5, long-horizon tasks, and workplace automation

* Using AI as a thinking partner rather than a productivity hammer

* Personal “AI resolutions” for 2026

* Why caution and curiosity must coexist going forward

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