Lifeboat Foundation

The brain, arrives at the claim that it possesses a non-physical, subjective awareness and assigns a high degree of certainty to that extraordinary claim. The theory does not address how the brain might actually possess a non-physical essence. It is not a theory that deals in the non-physical. It is about the computations that cause a machine to make a claim and to assign a high degree of certainty to the claim. The theory is offered as a possible starting point for building artificial consciousness. Given current technology, it should be possible to build a machine that contains a rich internal model of what consciousness is, attributes that property of consciousness to itself and to the people it interacts with, and uses that attribution to make predictions about human behavior. Such a machine would “believe” it is conscious and act like it is conscious, in the same sense that the human machine believes and acts.

This article is part of a special issue on consciousness in humanoid robots. The purpose of this article is to summarize the attention schema theory (AST) of consciousness for those in the engineering or artificial intelligence community who may not have encountered previous papers on the topic, which tended to be in psychology and neuroscience journals. The central claim of this article is that AST is mechanistic, demystifies consciousness and can potentially provide a foundation on which artificial consciousness could be engineered. The theory has been summarized in detail in other articles (e.g., Graziano and Kastner, 2011; Webb and Graziano, 2015) and has been described in depth in a book (Graziano, 2013). The goal here is to briefly introduce the theory to a potentially new audience and to emphasize its possible use for engineering artificial consciousness.

The AST was developed beginning in 2010, drawing on basic research in neuroscience, psychology, and especially on how the brain constructs models of the self (Graziano, 2010, 2013; Graziano and Kastner, 2011; Webb and Graziano, 2015). The main goal of this theory is to explain how the brain, a biological information processor, arrives at the claim that it possesses a non-physical, subjective awareness and assigns a high degree of certainty to that extraordinary claim. The theory does not address how the brain might actually possess a non-physical essence. It is not a theory that deals in the non-physical. It is about the computations that cause a machine to make a claim and to assign a high degree of certainty to the claim. The theory is in the realm of science and engineering.

OpenAI is reportedly tracking its progress toward building artificial general intelligence (AGI). This is AI that can outperform humans on most tasks. Using a set of five levels, the company can gauge its progress towards its ultimate goal.

According to Bloomberg, OpenAI believes its technology is approaching the second level of five on the path to artificial general intelligence. Anna Gallotti, co-chair of the International Coaching Federation’s special task force for AI and coaching, called this a “super AI” scale when sharing on LinkedIn, seeing the possibility for entrepreneurs, coaches and consultants.

Axios said that AI experts disagree over whether “today’s large language models, which excel at generating text and images, will ever be capable of broadly understanding the world and flexibly adapting to novel information and circumstances.” Disagreement means blind spots, which lead to opportunity.

Achieving such a concept — commonly referred to as AGI — is the driving mission of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and a priority for the elite research wings of tech giants https://fortune.com/company/amazon-com/” class=””>Amazon, https://fortune.com/company/alphabet/” class=””>Google, Meta and https://fortune.com/company/microsoft/” class=””>Microsoft.

It’s also a cause for concern https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-risks-uk-…d6e2b910b” rel=“noopener” class=””>for world governments. Leading AI scientists published research Thursday in the journal Science warning that unchecked AI agents with “long-term planning” skills could pose an existential risk to humanity.

But what exactly is AGI and how will we know when it’s been attained? Once on the fringe of computer science, it’s now a buzzword that’s being constantly redefined by those trying to make it happen.

A world teeming with self-aware brands would be quite hectic. According to Gartner, by 2025, generative A.I. will be a workforce partner within 90 percent of companies worldwide. This doesn’t mean that all of these companies will be surging toward organizational AGI, however. Generative A.I., and LLMs in particular, can’t meet an organization’s automation needs on its own. Giving an entire workforce access to GPTs or Copilot won’t move the needle much in terms of efficiency. It might help people write better emails faster, but it takes a great deal of work to make LLMs reliable resources for user queries.

Their hallucinations have been well documented and training them to provide trustworthy information is a herculean effort. Jeff McMillan, chief analytics and data officer at Morgan Stanley (MS), told me it took his team nine months to train GPT-4 on more than 100,000 internal documents. This work began before the launch of ChatGPT, and Morgan Stanley had the advantage of working directly with people at OpenAI. They were able to create a personal assistant that the investment bank’s advisors can chat with, tapping into a large portion of its collective knowledge. “Now you’re talking about wiring it up to every system,” he said, with regards to creating the kinds of ecosystems required for organizational A.I. “I don’t know if that’s five years or three years or 20 years, but what I’m confident of is that that is where this is going.”

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Where do we stand with artificial intelligence? Might machines take over our jobs? Can machines become conscious? Might we be harmed by robots? What is the future of humanity? Professor Giorgio Buttazzo of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna is an expert in artificial intelligence and neural networks. In a recent publication, he provides considered insights into some of the most pressing questions surrounding artificial intelligence and humanity.

A Brief History of Neural Networks and Deep Learning

In artificial intelligence (AI), computers can be taught to process data using neuron-like computing systems inspired by the mechanisms used by the human brain. These so-called neural networks represent a type of machine learning (‘deep learning’) in which interconnected nodes or neurons are able to adapt and learn from data to recognise patterns and solve complex problems.

A new study examines the possibility of consciousness in artificial systems, focusing on ruling out scenarios where AI appears conscious without actually being so.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has grown rapidly in the last few years, and with that increase, industries have been able to automate and improve their efficiency in operations.

A feature article published in AIChE Journal identifies the challenges and benefits of using Intelligence Augmentation (IA) in process safety systems.

Contributors to this work are Dr. Faisal Khan, professor and chemical engineering department head at Texas A&M University, Dr. Stratos Pistikopoulos, professor and director of the Energy Institute, Drs. Rajeevan Arunthavanathan, Tanjin Amin, and Zaman Sajid from the Mary Kay O’Connor Safety Center.

The concept of short-range order (SRO)—the arrangement of atoms over small distances—in metallic alloys has been underexplored in materials science and engineering. But the past decade has seen renewed interest in quantifying it, since decoding SRO is a crucial step toward developing tailored high-performing alloys, such as stronger or heat-resistant materials.

Understanding how atoms arrange themselves is no easy task and must be verified using intensive lab experiments or computer simulations based on imperfect models. These hurdles have made it difficult to fully explore SRO in metallic alloys.

But Killian Sheriff and Yifan Cao, graduate students in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), are using machine learning to quantify, atom by atom, the complex chemical arrangements that make up SRO. Under the supervision of Assistant Professor Rodrigo Freitas, and with the help of Assistant Professor Tess Smidt in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, their work was recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Pallets are everywhere, but training robots to stack them with goods takes forever. Fixing that could be a tangible win for commercial AI-powered robots.