Murray Shanahan is a professor of Cognitive Robotics at Imperial College London and a senior research scientist at DeepMind. He challenges our assumptions about AI consciousness and urges us to rethink how we talk about machine intelligence.
We explore the dangers of anthropomorphizing AI, the limitations of current language in describing AI capabilities, and the fascinating intersection of philosophy and artificial intelligence.
Show notes and full references: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ICtBI574W-xGi8Z2ZtUNeKWiOiGZ_DRsp9EnyYAISws/edit?usp=sharing
Prof Murray Shanahan:
https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~mpsha/ (look at his selected publications)
https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=00bnGpAAAAAJ&hl=en
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Shanahan
https://x.com/mpshanahan
Interviewer: Dr. Tim Scarfe
Refs (links in the Google doc linked above):
Role play with large language models
Waluigi effect
"Conscious Exotica" - Paper by Murray Shanahan (2016)
"Simulators" - Article by Janis from LessWrong
"Embodiment and the Inner Life" - Book by Murray Shanahan (2010)
"The Technological Singularity" - Book by Murray Shanahan (2015)
"Simulacra as Conscious Exotica" - Paper by Murray Shanahan (newer paper of the original focussed on LLMs)
A recent paper by Anthropic on using autoencoders to find features in language models (referring to the "Scaling Monosemanticity" paper)
Work by Peter Godfrey-Smith on octopus consciousness
"Metaphors We Live By" - Book by George Lakoff (1980s)
Work by Aaron Sloman on the concept of "space of possible minds" (1984 article mentioned)
Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations" (posthumously published)
Daniel Dennett's work on the "intentional stance"
Alan Turing's original paper on the Turing Test (1950)
Thomas Nagel's paper "What is it like to be a bat?" (1974)
John Searle's Chinese Room Argument (mentioned but not detailed)
Work by Richard Evans on tackling reasoning problems
Claude Shannon's quote on knowledge and control
"Are We Bodies or Souls?" - Book by Richard Swinburne
Reference to work by Ethan Perez and others at Anthropic on potential deceptive behavior in language models
Reference to a paper by Murray Shanahan and Antonia Creswell on the "selection inference framework"
Mention of work by Francois Chollet, particularly the ARC (Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus) challenge
Reference to Elizabeth Spelke's work on core knowledge in infants
Mention of Karl Friston's work on planning as inference (active inference)
The film "Ex Machina" - Murray Shanahan was the scientific advisor
"The Waluigi Effect"
Anthropic's constitutional AI approach
Loom system by Lara Reynolds and Kyle McDonald for visualizing conversation trees
DeepMind's AlphaGo (mentioned multiple times as an example)
Mention of the "Golden Gate Claude" experiment
Reference to an interview Tim Scarfe conducted with University of Toronto students about self-attention controllability theorem
Mention of an interview with Irina Rish
Reference to an interview Tim Scarfe conducted with Daniel Dennett
Reference to an interview with Maria Santa Caterina
Mention of an interview with Philip Goff
Nick Chater and Martin Christianson's book ("The Language Game: How Improvisation Created Language and Changed the World")
Peter Singer's work from 1975 on ascribing moral status to conscious beings
Demis Hassabis' discussion on the "ladder of creativity"
Reference to B.F. Skinner and behaviorism
