SAN FRANCISCO–You wouldn’t need to train a large language model on former vice president Al Gore’s speeches to know that he would use an appearance at an AI conference to support powering AI data centers with renewable energy instead of polluting fossil fuels.
But not many LLMs might have predicted that his talk at the HumanX conference here would focus on AI’s sentience as well as its sustainability. “I personally do believe that these, particularly the frontier models, have developed a sense of self,” Gore told onstage interviewer Eric Topol, EVP at Scripps Research.
He pointed to cases of AI models in tests responding to researchers moving to take them offline with threats of blackmail, saying that “these self-protective behaviors that have been reported quite a lot…may be part of a bundle with sense of self.”
The 78-year-old Gore, who served as vice president with President Clinton from 1993 to 2001 and is now chairman of Generation Investment Management, seemed to align himself with some of the youngest AI users in this take on silicon sentience.
But as he explained later in this half-hour session, he came to this view by a different path. Gore cited Nobel Prize-winning research by the Belgian physical chemist Ilya Prigogine into self-organizing systems as a model for eyeing how AI models can grow in unexpected ways.
“Why did one learn Sanskrit? Why did this one break out and start crypto mining?” Gore asked. “There has to have been a series of spontaneous reorganizations at a higher level of complexity.”
Gore suggested this might put AI models on a continuum of consciousness starting with some animals. “I think that my answer is yes, they have developed a sense of self, in my opinion, that is difficult to distinguish from consciousness,” he told Topol. “I’m going to risk going into the woo-woo realm here, but it may well be that consciousness is ubiquitous in the universe.”
(If that sounds deeply wonky, it was. Gore also name-checked pioneering AI researchers Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman and later quoted a few lyrics from singer-songwriters Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen.)
Business-Minded Sustainability
Gore sounded like less of a philosopher and more of an economist when Topol asked about the environmental consequences of AI. “I’ve been saying for some time now that I think it’s a cause for deep concern, but not panic,” Gore said.
He brought up a 2025 paper from “my friend Nick Stern at the London School of Economics, an economist I deeply respect,” that estimated that by 2035, AI could have a net-negative effect on human output of carbon dioxide and other gases that are warming the planet.
That report published in the scientific journal Nature predicted that AI models would deliver sufficient efficiency improvements in tasks like siting and managing solar and wind power, optimizing industrial logistics and advancing materials-science research to more than offset the carbon footprint of AI data centers.
In the nearer term, Gore urged the audience to look past the Trump administration’s attempts to slow or stop the adoption of wind and solar power in the US. “We may have had a climate policy recession under Trump and his administration, but the market is still choosing renewables,” he said. “Eighty percent of all the new electricity generation built in the US last year is renewable.”
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(Gore undersold the magnitude of that shift. The government’s Energy Information Administration estimated in February that solar and wind power as well as battery storage would add up to 93% of new power generation this year, up from about 88% in 2025.)
“Utility-scale batteries are coming down faster in price even than solar,” he said. “They’re really taking over.”
Gore also nodded to the present-day consequences of a warming earth, comparing some of the scenes of climate disasters to “a nature hike through the Book of Revelation.” He continued: “Even if for a season, the US has a president that says nonsensical things like it’s a Chinese hoax or whatever, it hasn’t gone away.”
Socioeconomic Side Effects
Gore–a legit techie who as a congressman from Tennessee successfully introduced a 1991 bill that meaningfully accelerated the internet’s development–said AI outranked the internet in its significance. But that also makes what Gore called “the most consequential technology ever developed” too important to be developed in the dark. He called the “constitution” Anthropic wrote for its Claude series of models itself a model for responsible AI development.
“I would like to see all of the pioneer models have a constitution that is public and not secret,” he said. “I think there ought to be a public discussion and debate of the constitution written for each of the pioneer models.”
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Likewise, Gore urged policymakers to pay attention to job displacements coming from AI.
“We should be preparing for the loss of knowledge work jobs in a number of categories,” he said. But he wasn’t sure what to do about that beyond retraining, adding that he had “kind of mixed feelings” about Universal Basic Income as a solution.
A year ago at HumanX, another former vice president offered a more dismissive take on UBI: “You know what people hear when you talk about UBI?” Kamala Harris said then. “You want to take my job and put me on welfare.”
After complaining about the continued inability of political leaders to focus on this looming problem, Gore griped that it was in line with how little they were doing on the climate crisis, gun violence, healthcare, and education.
“I’m sorry, I’m pressing my own buttons,” he joked before turning serious again. “There’s an asymmetric ability to manipulate public opinion, and the asymmetry is on the side of the wealthy and powerful.”
Gore left the audience with something of a homework assignment. “We need to use AI, along with other tools, to rekindle the spirit of America and reawaken the conversation and discourse of democracy so that we can govern ourselves effectively again, instead of giving in to these damn PR-, law firm-, consultant-driven broligarchs,” he said. “Always remember that political will itself is a renewable resource.”
Disclosure: I’m moderating two panels at HumanX, with the organizers covering my airfare and lodging.
About Our Expert
Experience
Rob Pegoraro writes about interesting problems and possibilities in computers, gadgets, apps, services, telecom, and other things that beep or blink. He’s covered such developments as the evolution of the cell phone from 1G to 5G, the fall and rise of Apple, Google’s growth from obscure Yahoo rival to verb status, and the transformation of social media from CompuServe forums to Facebook’s billions of users. Pegoraro has met most of the founders of the internet and once received a single-word email reply from Steve Jobs.
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