When AI gets the right answer, how do we know it got there the right way? Why do we assume that fluent language means intelligence? What do infants and chatbots have in common? What do AI’s mistakes teach us about our own minds? And what does any of this have to do with Frankenstein’s creature, why some people wear a stop sign on their T-shirt, or smiling monkeys? Join Eagleman today with computer scientist Melanie Mitchell, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute who’s working to bridge AI and cognitive science.

Episode Audio

Episode Video

More information

Melanie Mitchell’s essay on Substack: On Evaluating Cognitive Capabilities in Machines (and Other “Alien” Intelligences)

Michael C. Frank. Baby steps in evaluating the capacities of large language models. PsyArXiv.

Inner Cosmos Episode 88: Might there exist very different kinds of minds? with Kevin Kelly

Pictures from Melanie Mitchell’s talk at NeurIPS.

SUBSCRIBE AND LISTEN ON:

"[A] neuroscientist and polymath."
- Wall Street Journal
"What Eagleman seems to be calling for is a new Enlightenment."
- Sunday Herald
"Eagleman has a talent for testing the untestable, for taking seemingly sophomoric notions and using them to nail down the slippery stuff of consciousness."
- The New Yorker
"David Eagleman offers startling lessons.... His method is to ask us to cast off our lazy commonplace assumptions.
- The Guardian
"David Eagleman is the kind of guy who really does make being a neuroscientist look like fun."
- New York Times
"David Eagleman may be the best combination of scientist and fiction-writer alive."
- Stewart Brand
"A popularizer of impressive gusto...[Eagleman] aims, grandly, to do for the study of the mind what Copernicus did for the study of the stars."
- New York Observer