Google DeepMind: The Podcast Consciousness, Reasoning and the Philosophy of AI with Murray Shanahan
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Apr 24, 2025 
Join Murray Shanahan, Professor of Cognitive Robotics at Imperial College London and a principal scientist at Google DeepMind, as he explores the philosophical depths of AI. He discusses the limitations of the Turing Test, introducing the 'Garland test' for consciousness. Murray sheds light on the influence of films like 'Ex Machina' on public perception of AI. He also delves into the evolution of AI reasoning, contrasting symbolic methods with modern approaches, and questions the ethical implications of consciousness and suffering in artificial entities.
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Ex Machina's Philosophical Impact
- The film Ex Machina sparked important questions about AI and consciousness.
- It effectively raised awareness and debate around AI's philosophical dimensions.
Limitations of Symbolic AI
- Symbolic AI relied heavily on hand-coded "if-then" rules which were brittle and hard to create.
- This approach faced major challenges in encoding common sense knowledge formally.
Neural Networks Reviving Reasoning
- Modern large language models can generate reasoning chains, echoing old symbolic AI's reasoning goals.
- However, they do not use hard-coded rules but learned neural networks instead.