With few conversations did I feel the stakes to be so high, so thorny and complex. For this conversation on “Computing Differently,” I sat down with Dr Luc Steels and Dr Takashi Ikegami, two of the world’s preeminent researchers in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, and robotics — but researchers who come at the question of AI from a decidedly divergent perspective, that of the enactive approach and participatory sense-making. The conversation was one of not just defining the current stakes of AI research, but of considering the outer reaches of each guest’s thinking about AI and defining some of the intractable questions in the field today. How close does the apparent sense-making of a robot come to human sense-making? What defines participatory sense-making as a distinctly human activity? Can there be such a thing as an “enactive AI”? If so, what insights might it afford us about human cognition, and about AI itself? How are we to apply appropriate caution when discussing the current frontiers of AI research? Where should its priorities be? How can we grapple with the very real dangers of AI already at hand, such as the hypernormativity of predictive systems which propagate harmful biases and drive information pollution? As Luc Steels points out, it is not so much the AI systems that we ought to fear, but the human uses and misuses of them, and the exponential looping effect that takes hold between human and machine. 

From our discussion of the basics of robotics and large language models emerged some of the most limpid definitions of participatory sense-making I’ve heard yet, and both speakers took great care in clarifying some of the basic terms of the discussion, which have too often been obscured by the popular media. Whether or not you feel you have a stake in the ongoing AI conversation, this conversation sheds light on so many of the fundamental questions of what it means to be a creative, enactive, and participatory being in the world today — in short, what it means to be human.

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More information about Dr Luc Steels and Dr Takashi Ikegami.

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