I'm Peter Singer AI," the avatar says. I am almost expecting it to continue, like a reincarnated Clippy: "It looks like you're trying to solve a problem. The problem I am trying to solve is why Peter Singer, the man who has been called the world's most influential living philosopher, has created a chatbot. And also, whether it is any good. Me: Why do you exist?

Australian philosopher Peter Singer's book Animal Liberation, published in 1975, exposed the realities of life for animals in factory farms and testing laboratories and provided a powerful moral basis for rethinking our relationship to them. Now, nearly 50 years on, Singer, 76, has a revised version titled Animal Liberation Now. It comes on the heels of an updated edition of his popular Ethics in the Real World, a collection of short essays dissecting important current events, first published in 2016. Singer, a utilitarian, is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University. In addition to his work on animal ethics, he is also regarded as the philosophical originator of a philanthropic social movement known as effective altruism, which argues for weighing up causes to achieve the most good.

RICHARD DAWKINS: When we come to artificial intelligence and the possibility of their becoming conscious, we reach a profound philosophical difficulty. I am a philosophical naturalist; I'm committed to the view that there is nothing in our brains that violates the laws of physics, there's nothing that could not, in principle, be reproduced in technology. It hasn't been done yet; we're probably quite a long way away from it, but I see no reason why in the future we shouldn't reach the point where a human-made robot is capable of consciousness and of feeling pain. JOANNA BRYSON: So, one of the things that we did last year, which was pretty cool, the headlines, because we were replicating some psychology stuff about implicit bias--actually, the best one is something like'Scientists show that AI is sexist and racist and it's our fault,' which, that's pretty accurate because it really is about picking things up from our society. Anyway, the point was, so here is an AI system that is so humanlike that it's picked up our prejudices and whatever and it's just vectors.