Upcoming Event

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 –

Abstract: Since the 1960s, philosophers have seriously considered the possibility that psychological states could be multiply realizable in not only in humans and other terrestrial creatures, but also in potential alien and artificial cognizers. For many it has become an accepted constraint on our theories of the nature of perception and cognition that they would

Abstract: Since the 1960s, philosophers have seriously considered the possibility that psychological states could be multiply realizable in not only in humans and other terrestrial creatures, but also in potential alien and artificial cognizers. For many it has become an accepted constraint on our theories of the nature of perception and cognition that they would

Abstract: The idea that advances in the cognitive capacities of foundation models like LLMs will lead to a period of rapid, recursive self-improvement — an “intelligence explosion” or “technological singularity” — has recently come under sustained criticism by academic philosophers. I evaluate the extent to which this criticism successfully undermines the argument for a singularity,