with Patrick Butlin, Robert Long, Yoshua Bengio, and Grace Lindsay

Tuesday, September 5th, 2023 | 4:00pm ET
Virtual on Zoom | Register here

About the event

This event will feature four authors from the recently released and widely discussed AI consciousness report. This report argues for, and exemplifies, a rigorous and empirically grounded approach to AI consciousness: assessing existing AI systems in detail, in light of the best-supported neuroscientific theories of consciousness. The paper surveys several prominent scientific theories of consciousness, including recurrent processing theory, global workspace theory, higher-order theories, predictive processing, and attention schema theory. From these theories the authors derive "indicator properties" of consciousness, elucidated in computational terms that allow them to assess AI systems for these properties. They use these indicator properties to assess several recent AI systems, and discuss how future systems might implement them. In this event, the authors will summarize the report, offer perspectives from philosophy, cognitive science, and computer science, and respond to questions and comments.

About the panelists

Patrick Butlin is a philosopher of mind and cognitive science and a Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. His current research is on consciousness, agency and other mental capacities and attributes in AI.

Robert Long is a Research Affiliate at the Center for AI Safety. He recently completed his PhD in philosophy at New York University, during which he also worked as a Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute. He works on issues related to possible AI consciousness and sentience.

Yoshua Bengio is recognized worldwide as one of the leading experts in artificial intelligence, known for his conceptual and engineering breakthroughs in artificial neural networks and deep learning. He is a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at Université de Montréal and the Founder and Scientific Director of Mila – Quebec AI Institute, one of the world’s largest academic institutes in deep learning. He is also the Scientific Director of IVADO. His scientific contributions have earned him numerous awards. He is the 2018 laureate of the A.M. Turing Award, “the Nobel Prize of Computing,” alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun for their important contributions and advances in deep learning. In 2022, he was appointed Knight of the Legion of Honor by France and named co-laureate of Spain’s Princess of Asturias Award for technical and scientific research. Later that year, Professor Bengio became the most cited computer scientist in the world in terms of h-index. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and of Canada, an Officer of the Order of Canada and a Canadian CIFAR AI Chair.

Grace Lindsay is currently an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Data Science at New York University. After a BS in neuroscience from the University of Pittsburgh and a year at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Freiburg, Germany, Grace got her PhD at the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia University in the lab of Ken Miller. Following that, she was a Sainsbury Wellcome Centre/Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit Research Fellow at University College London.

Further information

The NYU Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program is dedicated to advancing understanding of the consciousness, sentience, sapience, and moral, legal, and political status of nonhumans, including animals and artificial intelligences. We believe that all beings with the capacity to suffer deserve to be treated with respect and compassion, and that our policies and practices should reflect this. Our goal is to promote research and scholarship that will help to shape a more just and humane world for all.*
*This program description was co-authored by GPT-3

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Thank you to the NYU Center for Bioethics and the NYU Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness for their generous support of this event.