How to build a Mind: Artificial Intelligence Reloaded

A foray into the present, future and ideas of Artificial Intelligence. Are we going to build (beyond) human-level artificial intelligence one day? Very likely. When? Nobody knows, because the specs are not fully done yet. But let me give you some of those we already know, just to get you started.

While large factions within the philosophy of mind still seem to struggle over the relationship between mind, world, meaning, intentionality, subjectivity, phenomenal experience, personhood and autonomy, Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers a clear and concise set of answers to these basic questions, as well as avenues of pursuing their eventual understanding. In the view of AI, minds are computational machines, whereby computationalism is best understood as the most contemporary version of the mechanist world view. In the lecture, I will briefly address some of the basic ideas that will underlie a unified computational model of the mind, and especially focus on a computational understanding of motivation and autonomy, representation and grounding, associative thinking, reason and creativity.

The Chaos Communication Congress Talks

In 2013, I attended the 30c3 to deliver a lecture on how to build an Artificial Intelligence to an audience of hackers. The Chaos Communication Congress is a fascinating venue, because it combines very smart and curious attendants with an opportunity to present ideas in a format that is unconstrained by our usual academic habits. It was so not only a lot of fun, but also helpful to express a lot of ideas that I would not have fixated anywhere else, and so I continued to produce presentations in the following years.

The xxC3 talks are attempts at answering the questions of the me that entered academia to learn about what minds are, and how they relate to the world. I still have these questions, but I have dug a few tunnels into the bedrock of my ignorance over the years, and I would like to show you where they have led me.