Upcoming Event

Abstract: Much of the recent discourse on AI consciousness has centered around two questions: is artificial consciousness possible in principle and do current systems meet the requirements laid out by prominent theories. For many practical purposes, it matters more whether we are likely to see nontrivial numbers of conscious artificial minds as the technology matures. […]

Abstract: Identifying the presence of consciousness is difficult even in humans when one does not want to rely on subjective reports [1,2], but it is increasingly more difficult in animals [3,4], and, due to the lack of common evolutionary history, even more so in artificial systems [5,6]. Currently, there are two major alternatives on the

Abstract: One of the more promising empirical theories of phenomenal consciousness is the Global Workspace Theory (GWT), which says that a mental representation becomes conscious when it enters a global workspace from which it can be broadcast to various specialized psychological modules [1-3]. There has been some discussion of GWT in connection with recent advancements

Abstract: One compelling approach to value alignment treats value alignment as fundamentally a question of the fairness of the procedure for determining the principles that AI systems should align with (Gabriel 2020). This talk examines the question of how a procedure should treat different stakeholders’ claims fairly, especially in multi-stakeholder cases where people have both

Abstract: The normative challenge of AI alignment centres upon what goals or values to encode in AI systems to govern their behaviour. A number of answers have been proposed, including the notion that AI must be aligned with human intentions or that it should aim to be helpful, honest and harmless. Nonetheless, both accounts suffer

Abstract: AI agents based on Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate human-level performance at some theory of mind (ToM) tasks (Kosinski 2024; Street et al. 2024). Here ToM is roughly the ability to predict and explain behaviour by attributing mental states to oneself and others. ToM capabilities matter for AI safety because, at least in humans,

Abstract: Maybe AIs have alien contents and we need a fundamentally different kind ofmetasemantics for AI systems than we do for humans. The aim is to explore a cluster of closely related topics: (i) What would it be for a system to have alien (non-human) contents and howcould we recognize these as contents? (ii) What

Abstract: The speaker will distinguish some different conceptions of alignment, exploring how each conception relates to safety and existential risk.

Abstract: Central to the inquiry of cognitive science is the idea of agents for whom there is the possibility of both success and failure. If we think that LLMs are the sort of thing that fall within the domain of cognitive science, then we should also ask whether they are agents of this kind –