ABC Seminar: Painful intelligence - What AI can tell us about human suffering
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Welcome to our ABC Seminars! This seminar series is open for everyone. The talk will take place in . After the talks, coffee and pulla will be served.
The event will be also streamed via Zoom at:
Abstract:
This talk introduces my recent e-book with the same title, freely available at . The book uses the modern theory of artificial intelligence (AI) to understand human suffering or mental pain. Both humans and sophisticated AI agents process information about the world in order to achieve goals and obtain rewards, which is why AI can be used as a model of the human brain and mind. The book starts with the assumption that suffering is mainly caused by frustration. Frustration means the failure of an agent (whether AI or human) to achieve a goal or a reward it wanted or expected. Frustration is inevitable because of the overwhelming complexity of the world, limited computational resources, and scarcity of good data. In particular, such limitations imply that an agent acting in the real world must cope with uncontrollability, unpredictability, and uncertainty, which all lead to frustration. Such computational theory is finally used to derive various interventions or training methods that will reduce suffering in humans. The ensuing interventions are very similar to those proposed by Buddhist and Stoic philosophy, and include mindfulness meditation.
Bio:
Aapo Hyvarinen studied undergraduate mathematics at the universities of Helsinki (Finland), Vienna (Austria), and Paris (France), and obtained a Ph.D. degree in Information Science at the Helsinki University of Technology in 1997. After post-doctoral work at the Helsinki University of Technology, he moved to the University of Helsinki in 2003, where he was appointed Professor in 2008, at the Department of Computer Science. From 2016 to 2019, he was Professor of Machine Learning at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London, UK. Aapo Hyvarinen is the main author of the books "Independent Component Analysis" (2001), "Natural Image Statistics" (2009), and "Painful Intelligence" (2022).