Biological cognition and “Artificial Intelligence”

Activities that only a few years ago were the exclusive domain of humans—such as medical decision making, artistic creation, caregiving—are now being assigned to artificial systems. In some cases the benefits of AI are clear, but even their creators admit that we do not understand these systems well enough to predict what their long-term impact will be. The ‘alignment problem’ refers to widespread concern for the unforeseeable consequences of depending on AI systems without understanding how they diverge from human minds. The ‘alignment problem’ is not just about AI, however. As argued by neuroscientist Rafael Yuste, we cannot hope to solve the alignment problem if we cannot say what ‘natural intelligence’ is. Beyond the enormous regulatory and policy challenges presented by AI, then, there is an urgent need for interdisciplinary reflection on the differences between living systems and machines and the kinds of ‘intelligence’ they support—on the difference between biological cognition and AI.

From August 31 to September 3, 2024, in Santander (Spain), CINET will host an invitation-only workshop in which these questions will be explored by world-leading researchers in multiple fields of neuroscience and philosophy. As in previous workshops, the program includes a mixture of round tables and traditional talks, but in all sessions our goal is to have a rich and open conversation in which all participants are involved.