Artificial Intelligence: Limitations, Foundations, and New Directions

The 24th annual CUNY Graduate Student Philosophy Conference

Artificial Intelligence: Limitations, Foundations, and New Directions

Keynote Speakers: Jesse Prinz (CUNY), TBA

Contemporary research in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) is proving dramatically successful where earlier projects stalled. Image models and language models today display sophisticated (and sometimes uncanny) abilities in some narrow domains. Various flavors of machine learning see applications in many industries, and seem poised to seriously alter creative human work, policing and surveillance, medicine, entertainment, war, prediction and forecasting, etc. There is an opening for philosophers to write about the character and use of such systems now, as they grow out of their infancy and see increasingly widespread integration in society – and before their norms and uses become established, locked in, and hard to change.

Possible topics include

• AI ethics and safety
• Autonomous weapons and philosophy
• Deepfakes and philosophy
• Race, Gender and current applications of AI (e.g. facial recognition)
• AI in Policing and the Justice Systems
• Whether Strong AI is possible
• What intelligence is
• Predictive algorithms and philosophy
• The relationship between AI and human/animal cognition
• Interpretable and explainable AI
• The Transformer architecture and deep learning and philosophy
• The nature of computation
• The limitations of AI
• Consciousness and AI
• The frame problem o Agency and AI 

Please submit abstracts to [email protected]. Include your name and institutional affiliation in the email body. Abstracts should be attached in PDF format and should be prepared for blind review. Abstracts should be less than 300 words. Papers must be suitable for a 30- minute presentation.

Abstracts must be submitted by March 19. Successful applicants will be contacted by April 1.