AI and Consciousness

Co-leads: Stephanie Hare and Turhan Canli

Activities

The Need for Neurocomputational Ethics

Monday, November 27, 1:00–2:30 p.m. EST

Special topics in neuroethics are on the rise. Neuro-Computational Ethics, as one of them, deserves more sustained attention and scholarship. The National Academy of Engineering tasked leading technological thinkers with identifying grand challenges for engineering in the 21st century. Most of the challenges and opportunities that they came up with are more or less irrelevant for neuroethics. However, “Reverse-Engineering the Brain” (NAE 2023) is a topic of neuroethical import par excellence. Reverse-engineering the brain as an engineering challenge starts with the premise that general-purpose artificial intelligence has remained elusive because artificial brains have been designed without much attention to real ones. This intersection of engineering and neuroscience promises great advances and brings novel ethical challenges. We can count on engineering’s and neurosciences’ best minds to continue relentlessly pursuing the creation of computers emulating human intelligence, with massively parallel processing and vast connectivity, akin to human neural networks.

In this talk, I will review recent work from my NeuroComputational Ethics Research Group (go.ncsu.edu/ncerg) and note areas that need for more sustained ethical reflection, such as implementation of neurocomputational models in AI agents, or technological coupling of brains and computers, and other emerging issues at the intersection of artificial intelligence and neurotechnology.

Q&A and casual discussion will follow the talk that starts at 1:00 p.m. EST

https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/99652902803?pwd=N3VRSXArelBpRWNOdlZ5M2wxeHowUT09
Meeting ID: 996 5290 2803
Passcode: 254952

Zoom Link

Veljko Dubljević

North Carolina State University

Dr. Dubljević, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Science, Technology & Society (STS) at NC State. Before NC State, he spent three years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Neuroethics Research Unit at IRCM and McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He has a background in philosophy, economics, bioethics and neuroscience.