To celebrate PolyU's 85th Anniversary, PAIR co-organised a Joint Distinguished Lecture titled “AI, Consciousness and Ethics: Towards a Principled and Empathic AI” with the Faculty of Humanities on 18 October 2022. We are honoured to have invited two distinguished speakers: Prof. Manuel Blum, Bruce Nelson Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Professor Emeritus of EECS at UC Berkeley, and Visiting Chair Professor at Peking University — who is one of the founders of complexity theory and a winner of the Turing Award — as well as Prof. Lenore Blum, Distinguished Career Professor Emerita of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Distinguished Professor-in-Residence of EECS at UC Berkeley and Visiting Chair Professor at Peking University.
With an online audience of 200, the Distinguished Lecture addressed the development of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) with reference to the Conscious Turing Machine (CTM), a framework for a conscious AI. The speakers also examined consciousness from the perspective of Theoretical Computer Science (TCS), a branch of mathematics that seeks to understand the underlying principles of computation and complexity, including the implications and surprising consequences of resource limitations.
