Prof. Murray Shanahan - Machines Don't Think Like Us

Murray Shanahan is a professor of Cognitive Robotics at Imperial College London and a senior research scientist at DeepMind. He challenges our assumptions about AI consciousness and urges us to rethink how we talk about machine intelligence. We explore the dangers of anthropomorphizing AI, the limitations of current language in describing AI capabilities, and the fascinating intersection of philosophy and artificial intelligence. Show notes and full references: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ICtBI574W-xGi8Z2ZtUNeKWiOiGZ_DRsp9EnyYAISws/edit?usp=sharing Prof Murray Shanahan: https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~mpsha/ (look at his selected publications) https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=00bnGpAAAAAJ&hl=en https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Shanahan https://x.com/mpshanahan Interviewer: Dr. Tim Scarfe Refs (links in the Google doc linked above): Role play with large language models Waluigi effect "Conscious Exotica" - Paper by Murray Shanahan (2016) "Simulators" - Article by Janis from LessWrong "Embodiment and the Inner Life" - Book by Murray Shanahan (2010) "The Technological Singularity" - Book by Murray Shanahan (2015) "Simulacra as Conscious Exotica" - Paper by Murray Shanahan (newer paper of the original focussed on LLMs) A recent paper by Anthropic on using autoencoders to find features in language models (referring to the "Scaling Monosemanticity" paper) Work by Peter Godfrey-Smith on octopus consciousness "Metaphors We Live By" - Book by George Lakoff (1980s) Work by Aaron Sloman on the concept of "space of possible minds" (1984 article mentioned) Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations" (posthumously published) Daniel Dennett's work on the "intentional stance" Alan Turing's original paper on the Turing Test (1950) Thomas Nagel's paper "What is it like to be a bat?" (1974) John Searle's Chinese Room Argument (mentioned but not detailed) Work by Richard Evans on tackling reasoning problems Claude Shannon's quote on knowledge and control "Are We Bodies or Souls?" - Book by Richard Swinburne Reference to work by Ethan Perez and others at Anthropic on potential deceptive behavior in language models Reference to a paper by Murray Shanahan and Antonia Creswell on the "selection inference framework" Mention of work by Francois Chollet, particularly the ARC (Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus) challenge Reference to Elizabeth Spelke's work on core knowledge in infants Mention of Karl Friston's work on planning as inference (active inference) The film "Ex Machina" - Murray Shanahan was the scientific advisor "The Waluigi Effect" Anthropic's constitutional AI approach Loom system by Lara Reynolds and Kyle McDonald for visualizing conversation trees DeepMind's AlphaGo (mentioned multiple times as an example) Mention of the "Golden Gate Claude" experiment Reference to an interview Tim Scarfe conducted with University of Toronto students about self-attention controllability theorem Mention of an interview with Irina Rish Reference to an interview Tim Scarfe conducted with Daniel Dennett Reference to an interview with Maria Santa Caterina Mention of an interview with Philip Goff Nick Chater and Martin Christianson's book ("The Language Game: How Improvisation Created Language and Changed the World") Peter Singer's work from 1975 on ascribing moral status to conscious beings Demis Hassabis' discussion on the "ladder of creativity" Reference to B.F. Skinner and behaviorism