Is AI Like us and will it like us?

At this year’s Gödel Lecture, Geoffrey Hinton will give a brief and biased history of AI and then present a way of visualizing roughly what happens when an AI understands a sentence. It is very unlike translating into some special internal language and much more like folding a protein. He’ll argue that current AIs understand natural language in pretty much the same way as we do, claim that most people have a completely wrong theory of what subjective experience is, and that there is no reason why AIs cannot have subjective experiences.

Given that chatbots understand language in much the same way we do, can have subjective experience in much the same way we do, already know much more than any one person – and will soon be much smarter than us – he will discuss some of the risks of releasing AI agents that were designed to maximize profits. He will also describe a way of reframing the problem of how we can coexist with superintelligent AI.