Florida Atlantic’s Mindfest Explores the Future of Artificial Intelligence

Florida Atlantic’s Center for the Future Mind hosted the second annual Mindfest conference in February 2024. The theme for  Mindfest 2024 was Digital Physics, Chatbot Epistemology, and the Future of AGI.  

Keynote speakers included Stuart Hameroff, co-founder, director, Center for Consciousness Studies and Professor Emeritus, Departments of Anesthesiology and Psychology, University of Arizona; Sara Imari Walker, theoretical physicist and Deputy Director of the Beyond Center, Arizona State University; Scott Aaronson, OpenAI/David J. Bruton Jr. Centennial Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin; Hartmut Neven, vice president of engineering at Google and Founder and Head of Google’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab; Thomas Pike, dean, Oettinger School of Science and Technology, National Intelligence University (NIU), Washington, D.C.; and Michael Patrick Lynch, Provost Professor of the Humanities and Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy; and David Chalmers, New York University.

The conference is organized by Susan Schneider, the William F. Dietrich Distinguished Professor at FAU, former NASA chair and Distinguished Scholar at the Library of Congress. The Center is based within FAU’s Brain Institute, as well as the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters at FAU.

Conference sessions included:

• Is Your Brain a Quantum Orchestra? The ‘Orch OR’ Theory of Consciousness;
• Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation: Why Physicists Are Studying Human Consciousness and AI to Unravel the Mysteries of the Universe;
• The Problem of Human Specialness in the Age of AI;
• Democratic AI: The Benefits and Dangers of the Complex System Driving AI; and
• Are we in a computer simulation, and if so, why would it matter?

For more information, visit   Center for the Future Mind.