Synopsis: The arrival of homo sapiens on Earth amounted to a singularity for its ecosystems, a transition that dramatically changed the distribution and interaction of living species within a relatively short amount of time. Such transitions are not unprecedented during the evolution of life, but machine intelligence represents a new phenomenon: for the first time, there are agents on earth that are not part of the biosphere. Instead of competing for a niche in the ecosystems of living systems, AI might compete with life itself.

How can we understand agency in the context of the cooperation and competition between AI, humans and other organisms?

0:00 Introduction
1:14 Presentation starts
1:48 Spirits & western confusion about consciousness
5:48 Genesis: an updated version of the origin story (6 stages)
13:30 The history of studying agency
15:07 Today's models & AI systems
18:35 Cybernetics: modeling in the service of control
22:09 Computation vs. cybernetics
24:29 How do neurons compute minds?
26:45 Neural circuits in artificial neural networks
28:17 Is the circuit metaphor wrong? Self organization in biological neurons & Neural Darwinism
32:22 Conscious seed theory (technological design vs. organic growth)
38:31 Hierarchy & design constraints of causal systems, groups, state governments & agents
43:55 The society of mind, self regulation & the consciousness prior
48:53 Attention as an agent & role of consciousness
51:19 Society of minds: human intellect & civilization intellect
53:44 Stages of intelligent agency (societal agency, Maslow's hierarchy, "sacredness")
57:57 Principles for emergent higher level agency (7 virtues)
1:02:20 The alignment problem
1:07:26 Q&A

This talk was part of the ‘Stepping Into the Future‘ conference.
http://www.scifuture.org/agency-in-age-of-machines-joscha-bach/

Bio: Joscha Bach, Ph.D. is an AI researcher who worked and published about cognitive architectures, mental representation, emotion, social modeling, and multi-agent systems. He earned his Ph.D. in cognitive science from the University of Osnabrück, Germany, and has built computational models of motivated decision making, perception, categorization, and concept-formation. He is especially interested in the philosophy of AI and in the augmentation of the human mind.

Joscha has taught computer science, AI, and cognitive science at the Humboldt-University of Berlin and the Institute for Cognitive Science at Osnabrück.

His book “Principles of Synthetic Intelligence – PSI: An Architecture of Motivated Cognition” (Oxford University Press) is available on amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Synthetic-Intelligence-PSI-Architectures/dp/0195370678

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