Kadish Workshop in Law, Philosophy, and Political Theory: Yohsua Bengio, Université de Montréal

About Yoshua Bengio:

Recognized worldwide as one of the leading experts in artificial intelligence, Yoshua Bengio is most known for his pioneering work in deep learning, earning him the 2018 A.M. Turing Award, “the Nobel Prize of Computing,” with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun. 

He is Full Professor at Université de Montréal, and the Founder and Scientific Director of Mila – Quebec AI Institute. He co-directs the CIFAR Learning in Machines & Brains program as Senior Fellow and acts as Scientific Director of IVADO. 

In 2019, he was awarded the prestigious Killam Prize and in 2022, became the most cited computer scientist in the world. He is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of London and Canada, Knight of the Legion of Honor of France, Officer of the Order of Canada, Member of the UN’s Scientific Advisory Board for Independent Advice on Breakthroughs in Science and Technology since 2023 and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair.

Concerned about the social impact of AI, he actively contributed to the Montreal Declaration for the Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence.

Talk Title and Abstract:

Subjective Experience as a Side Effect and Implications for AI Rights and AI Safety

Subjective experience has key characteristics that I will show could be explained by a mathematical theory of brain dynamics when we become conscious of something, a theory that is consistent with neuroscience data. These characteristics are that subjective experience is rich, ineffable, fleeting and personal. According to this theory, subjective experience would be a side-effect of the particular implementation of an inference process approximated by the brain. It is likely that we will continue making progress towards computational theories that explain why humans make the reports about consciousness that they do and how these computations are related to functional advantages in terms of intellectual capabilities. However, even faced with scientific evidence to the contrary, it is plausible that many humans will continue to feel something magical and mysterious about consciousness. This could have dangerous consequences for our global safety as AI capabilities continue to grow, eventually beyond human levels. The problem is that humans tend to associate consciousness with moral status. I will argue that if we attribute self-preservation rights to superhuman AIs (like we do for any agent with a moral patient status), we would naturally give or allow them the corresponding self-preservation goals, and that this could come in conflict with our own goals of well-being, thus endangering humanity.

Please note that Professor Yoshua Bengio will be presenting his talk over Zoom only. Workshop attendees are welcome to participate either in person in Room 141 or over Zoom.

About the Workshop:

A workshop for presenting and discussing work in progress in moral, political, and legal theory. The central aim is to provide an opportunity for students to engage with philosophers, political theorists, and legal scholars working on normative questions. Another aim is to bring together people from different disciplines who have strong normative interests or who speak to issues of potential interest to philosophers and political theorists.

The theme for the Spring 2024 workshop is “Intelligence: Human, Animal, Artificial,” and we will host scholars working in Philosophy, Biology, Psychology, Law, and Engineering. Our underlying concern will be the normative implications of different ideas of what intelligence is and can do.

This semester the workshop is co-taught by Christopher Kutz and Josh Cohen.