AI Agency and Wellbeing Workshop
The workshop explores the following questions:
- Can a large language model be a cognitive and linguistic agent (in the way that humans are agents)?
- Can there be such a thing as AI well-being?
- If the answers are yes, what are the implications?
Date: November 21, 2023
Title: Might Language Agents Be Conscious?
Speaker: Dr Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini, Rutgers University – Newark
Abstract:
Though philosophers have begun to consider the question of whether the kinds of artificial systems produced by the deep learning revolution of the past decade might be phenomenally conscious, no work has yet taken up the question of how the recent rise of agentized language models bears on the question of consciousness. We draw on leading philosophical and scientific theories of consciousness to assess whether such language agent architectures might be more likely to than other deep learning systems to be phenomenally conscious.