Episode description

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Professor Murray Shanahan is a renowned researcher on sophisticated cognition and its implications for artificial intelligence. His 2016 article ‘Conscious Exotica’ explores the Space of Possible Minds, a concept first proposed by philosopher Aaron Sloman in 1984, which includes all the different forms of minds from those of other animals to those of artificial intelligence. Shanahan rejects the idea of an impenetrable realm of subjective experience and argues that the majority of the space of possible minds may be occupied by non-natural variants, such as the ‘conscious exotica’ of which he speaks.  In his paper ‘Talking About Large Language Models’, Shanahan discusses the capabilities and limitations of large language models (LLMs). He argues that prompt engineering is a key element for advanced AI systems, as it involves exploiting prompt prefixes to adjust LLMs to various tasks. However, Shanahan cautions against ascribing human-like characteristics to these systems, as they are fundamentally different and lack a shared comprehension with humans. Even though LLMs can be integrated into embodied systems, it does not mean that they possess human-like language abilities. Ultimately, Shanahan concludes that although LLMs are formidable and versatile, we must be wary of over-simplifying their capacities and limitations.

YT version: https://youtu.be/BqkWpP3uMMU

Full references on the YT description. 

[00:00:00] Introduction

[00:08:51] Consciousness and  Consciousness Exotica

[00:34:59] Slightly Consciousness LLMs

[00:38:05] Embodiment

[00:51:32] Symbol Grounding 

[00:54:13] Emergence

[00:57:09] Reasoning

[01:03:16] Intentional Stance

[01:07:06] Digression on Chomsky show and Andrew Lampinen

[01:10:31] Prompt Engineering

Find Murray online:

https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~mpsha/

https://twitter.com/mpshanahan?lang=en

https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=00bnGpAAAAAJ&hl=en

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