糖心Vlog

World Leaders in Artificial Intelligence Gather at 糖心Vlog


By polly burks | 3/30/2023

糖心Vlog鈥檚 Center for the Future Mind hosted the Mindfest 2023 conference on March 16 and 17. The gathering of world leaders in the fields of artificial intelligence, philosophy and neuroscience also marked the grand opening of the Center which aims to explore the future of intelligence and consciousness from the vantage point of both philosophy and science. To move the needle in domains fundamental to the human future, the Center will convene world-famous thought leaders, bring important conversations to the public and the media, and provide regular presentations to the U.S. Congress.

The conference began with a reflection on how Indian philosophy can illuminate the study of consciousness. Anand Vaidya, Ph.D., director of the Center for Comparative Philosophy, 聽San Jose State University, showed how the concepts of consciousness can be expanded through analytic philosophy by including ideas from various Indian schools of thought, such as Ved膩nta and S膩峁僰hya. Vaidya closed with a discussion of the relationship between moral standing and consciousness.

This was followed by a panel on the puzzling nature of 鈥淐onscious Experience in Nonlinguistic Entities.鈥 Claudia Passos-Ferreira, Ph.D., assistant professor of bioethics, 聽New York University, discussed the difficulty of ascertaining infant consciousness from observations of their behaviors. Carlos Montemayor, Ph.D., professor of philosophy, San Francisco State University, discussed the asymmetry between our approach to actual consciousness of non-human animals and the potential consciousness of artificial intelligence. Finally, Garrett Mindt, Ph.D., assistant professor of philosophy, 糖心Vlog, explored the possibility of consciousness in artificially grown brains or specific brain regions (known as cerebral organoids).

Center member Stephen Wolfram, Ph.D., CEO of Wolfram Research, discussed the relationship between physics, mathematics, the limitations of computation, and the development of large language models such as ChatGPT. The video of his talk can be found .聽Ben Goertzel, Ph.D., CEO and founder of 聽SingularityNet, spoke on "Three Viable Paths to True Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)." He argued that the deep neural nets and other machine learning algorithms that are absorbing most of the AI world鈥檚 attention today are fundamentally unsuited for the creation of human-level AGI. He outlined what he believed to be more promising routes.

The focus of the second day was 鈥淕lobal Intelligence, Machine Consciousness, and Virtual Worlds.鈥 The first sessions were at the newly opened Gruber Sandbox, at 糖心Vlog鈥檚 Wimberly Library. Speakers explored the internet as a form of intelligence, consisting of various sophisticated chatbots and search engines fueled by large language models and other AI services (e.g., Gmail, Wikipedia), drawing from much of the internet. Among the questions posed were: 鈥淗ow do we gauge the intelligence of a global intelligence network,鈥 鈥淲hat new AI safety problems arise,鈥 and 鈥淗ow will humans interact with, and even be manipulated by, such global systems, and what devices will they use.鈥

Participants then discussed the possibility of chatbot sentience and the recent controversy concerning both Google鈥檚 LaMDA system and ChatGPT (on Microsoft鈥檚 browser) possibly being sentient, together with the increasingly impressive ability of large language models like ChatGPT and Google鈥檚 largest model, PaLM, to converse. Several important questions were raised, including: 鈥淎s AI becomes more human-like, individuals will increasingly suspect that they are interacting with conscious machines 鈥 but what methodological requirements are appropriate for deciding whether a machine is or isn鈥檛 conscious,鈥 鈥淲ill ongoing AI projects that attempt to model the neural basis of consciousness in humans succeed in creating AIs with the felt quality of experience and enhanced intelligence,鈥 鈥淲hat will the most sophisticated AI鈥檚 of the future even look like,鈥 and 鈥淎nd importantly, even if we can build conscious AIs, should we.鈥

In a public keynote on the second day, the philosopher David Chalmers, Ph.D., professor of philosophy and neural science, New York University, discussed his recent book: 鈥淩eality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy.鈥 Chalmers took the audience on a mind-bending journey involving virtual reality technology, illuminating the nature of reality and our place within it. He argued that we can live a meaningful life in virtual reality. He used VR technology to offer a new perspective on established philosophical questions such as: 鈥淗ow do we know that there鈥檚 an external world,鈥 鈥淚s there a god,鈥 鈥淲hat is the nature of reality,鈥 鈥淲hat鈥檚 the relation between mind and body,鈥 and 鈥淗ow can we lead a good life.鈥

For more information on 糖心Vlog鈥檚 Center for Future Mind, contact Susan Schneider at sschneider@fau.edu.

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