Darrell Laham presents:
The Hard Problem of Artificial Intelligence
Friday, May 26, 2023 at Noon (doors open at 11:30 am)
Avalon Ballroom – 6185 Arapahoe Rd. Boulder, Colorado 80303
In this talk we will explore the latest developments in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) applications, including midJourney and chatGPT, and the subsequent implications for understanding sentience and consciousness. GAI has made remarkable progress in creating images, music, video, and text that are considered ‘human-competitive’.
As we approach the possibility of truly intelligent machines (Artificial General Intelligence) and super-intelligence (The Singularity), we face a challenging philosophical issue: the Hard Problem of Consciousness. While it is relatively easy to understand how brains (and machines) process information and respond to stimuli, it is much harder to explain how and why those processes give rise to subjective experiences like pain, pleasure, and the perception of color. Philosophers have proposed various theories about consciousness, including emergence and panpsychism, which we will explore in the context of both humans and AI.
As we continue to develop AI, we must also consider the implications for the future of society. If we create conscious machines, how will we relate to them? While the development of AI presents significant practical, philosophical and ethical challenges, including impacts on employment, privacy, and social inequality, this talk will emphasize that its potential to improve society is still greater than its potential to harm humanity.
Darrell Laham has been a developer and advocate of AI applications in education, the military, and the intelligence community since 1998 when he co-founded Knowledge Analysis Technologies. His work on early Large Language Models, then called ‘Statistical Semantics’, led to some of the first commercial AI applications, including Pearson Education’s WriteToLearn (automated essay and summary scoring). After his company was acquired by Pearson in 2005, Darrell began work on the Synergy Engine with Barbara Marx Hubbard as Executive Director of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution. He holds a Joint PhD in Cognitive Science and Psychology from the University of Colorado Boulder.