The Importance of Consciousness

In episode 68 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Joanna Bryson.

Professor Bryson is Professor of Ethics and Technology at the Hertie School, where her research focuses on the impact of technology on human cooperation and AI/ICT governance. Professor Bryson has advised companies, governments, transnational agencies, and NGOs, particularly in AI policy. She is one of the few people doing this sort of work who actually has a PhD and work experience in AI, but also advanced degrees in the social sciences. She started her academic career though in the liberal arts, and publishes regularly in the natural sciences.

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Outline:

* (00:00) Intro

* (01:35) Intro to Professor Bryson’s work

* (06:37) Shifts in backgrounds expected of AI PhDs/researchers

* (09:40) Masters’ degree in Edinburgh, Behavior-Based AI

* (11:00) PhD, differences between MIT’s engineering focus and Edinburgh, systems engineering + AI

* (16:15) Comments on ways you can make contributions in AI

* (18:45) When definitions of “intelligence” are important

* (24:23) Non- and proto-linguistic aspects of intelligence, arguments about text as a description of human experience

* (31:45) Cognitive leaps in interacting with language models

* (37:00) Feelings of affiliation for robots, phenomenological experience in humans and (not) in AI systems

* (42:00) Language models and technological systems as cultural artifacts, expressing agency through machines

* (44:15) Capabilities development and moral patient status in AI systems

* (51:20) Prof. Bryson’s perspectives on recent AI regulation

* (1:00:55) Responsibility and recourse, Uber self-driving crash

* (1:07:30) “Preparing for AGI,” “Living with AGI,” how to respond to recent AI developments

* (1:12:18) Outro

Links:

* Professor Bryson’s homepage and Twitter

* Papers

* Systems AI

* Behavior Oriented Design, action selection, key differences in methodology/views between systems AI researchers and e.g. connectionists

* Agent architecture as object oriented design (1998)

* Intelligence by design: Principles of modularity and coordination for engineering complex adaptive agents (2001)

* Cognition

* Age-Related Inhibition and Learning Effects: Evidence from Transitive Performance (2013)

* Primate Errors in Transitive ‘Inference’: A Two-Tier Learning Model (2007)

* Skill Acquisition Through Program-Level Imitation in a Real-Time Domain

* Agent-Based Models as Scientific Methodology: A Case Study Analysing Primate Social Behaviour (2008, 2011)

* Social learning in a non-social reptile (Geochelone carbonaria) (2010)

* Understanding and Addressing Cultural Variation in Costly Antisocial Punishment (2014)

* Polarization Under Rising Inequality and Economic Decline (2020)

* Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases (2017)

* Evolutionary Psychology and Artificial Intelligence: The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Human Behaviour (2020)

* Ethics/Policy

* Robots should be slaves (2010)

* Standardizing Ethical Design for Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems (2017)

* Of, For, and By the People: The Legal Lacuna of Synthetic Persons (2017)

* Patiency is not a virtue: the design of intelligent systems and systems of ethics (2018)

* Other writing

* Reflections on the EU’s AI Act

* Is There an AI Cold War?

* Living with AGI

* One Day, AI Will Seem as Human as Anyone. What Then?