Hod Lipson (hodlipson.com) is a roboticist who works in the areas of artificial intelligence and digital manufacturing. I talk to Hod about the nature of self-awareness. Topics discussed include: how close we are to self-conscious machines; what he views as likely building strategies that will yield self-aware machines; what it takes for something to be considered self-aware; how artificial intelligence research might help us better understand the structure of our own minds and how we behave; and what he sees as the risks of AI.
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Resources related to this topic or mentioned in this episode:
- Hod Lipson’s wikipedia page
- Hod Lipson’s TED Talk
- Interview of Lipson in Quanta magazine about self-aware machines
- An explanation of “bottom up” vs “top down” work in artificial intelligence
- A Guardian article about Hofstadter’s idea of consciousness being a “strange loop”
- A paper on the function of the conscious experience of pain in driving evolution
- A post about Pentti Haikonen’s idea of “self-explanatory information” in form of sensation and/or pain
- Wikipedia about Daniel Dennett’s “multiple drafts” theory of consciousness, which pertains to part of interview where we talk about self-awareness involving multiple self-models