CAS-Gastvortrag

At the invitation of the current CAS cohort, Prof. Schellenberg will speak on “Self-Governance in Human and Machine Intelligence.” Her talk is part of the cohort’s project entitled “Knowledge acquisition, representation and application in human minds and machines.”

Susanna Schellenberg's talk will be streamed on Zoom as well. Thus, a (virtual) participation is possible. Please use the following link to access the Zoom meeting: https://uni-mannheim.zoom-x.de/j/64629738857. You will first enter the so-called “waiting room”. The host will give you access once the event officially starts.

Abstract:
Our capacity for reflection and self-governance allows us to introspect on our thoughts and preferences, engage in metacognition, and evaluate our progress on projects while reconfiguring our approach as needed. Despite being central to human intelligence, reflection has received marginal attention in developing artificial intelligence. There are burgeoning signs of an artificial equivalent of our capacity for reflection. To illustrate, so-called self-attention mechanisms and metacognition in Large Language Models, meta-reinformecemnt learning moduls, and self-improving systems can each be argued to be examples of systems that possess the capacity for reflection. However, in each case, the capacity is rigid in its scope compared our human capacity, and it developed as a side-effect of pursuing other goals. To date, no explicit attention has been directed at artificially replicating this central element of human intelligence. The paper argues that a general capacity for reflection and self-governance is key to bringing AI to the next level.