53. AI, Consciousness, and the Future Mind (with Dr. Susan Schneider)

This is an episode from UMass Boston’s ‘Ethics in Action’ Podcast mini-series on brain-computer interfaces that I currently co-host with sociologist and bioethicist James Hughes. In this episode, we are joined by Susan Schneider. Dr. Schneider is the founding director of the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University, where she is the William F. Dietrich Distinguished Professor of Philosophy. She specializes in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of artificial intelligence, metaphysics, and the philosophy of cognitive science. Dr. Schneider has written several influential books, including most recently Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind.  In addition to being an academic philosopher, Dr. Schneider is a very successful public philosopher. She frequently writes opinion pieces for outlets like the New York Times and Scientific American, and appears on TV shows on stations such as PBS and The History Channel. This episode covers many topics, including philosophical questions about the self and consciousness in the context of future brain chips, the possibility of mind uploading, quantum mechanics and Susan’s new theory of consciousness that she calls ‘superpsychism’, surveillance capitalism and privacy concerns surrounding AI and brain-computer interfaces, AI digital twins, brain-to-brain interfaces and questions about the unity of consciousness, what Susan calls the Global Brain Hypothesis and the new control problem, AI regulation and the AI global arms race, the concept of AGI and what it takes to create it, and epistemological issues surrounding AI as they relate to the opacity of AI systems and the hallucination problem for large language models.