In Conversation: The Power of Chatbots to Control Human Knowledge

In this episode, Dean Horswell chats with Susan Schneider, as they discuss her book, Artificial You: AI And The Future of Your Mind and the subject of Alien Intelligence and A.I.

Dr. Susan Schneider is a philosopher and cognitive scientist whose work focuses on AI consciousness, the simulation hypothesis, and the future of intelligence. Her recent research spans questions such as whether advanced AI systems could be conscious, what it would mean if we live in a computer simulation, how consciousness relates to quantum mechanics, the emerging “epistemology” of AI chatbots, and how we might understand the nature of alien superintelligence.

Dr. Schneider is the Founding Director of The Center for the Future of AI, Mind and Society at Florida Atlantic University. Previously, she served as the NASA–Baruch Blumberg Chair in Astrobiology and Technological Innovation at NASA, held the Distinguished Scholar Chair at the Library of Congress, and was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Her book, Artificial You: AI and the Future of  Your Mind, explores the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence, with a special focus on AI consciousness, mind design, and brain–machine interfaces (BMIs). She argues that the mind is not a ‘program’ and that the most intelligent alien life in the cosmos is likely to be superintelligent AI rather than biological beings.

Schneider’s recent work develops Superpsychism, the view that our spatiotemporal universe may be generated or structured by a massive qubit-based quantum computer, potentially a natural phenomenon rather than an artifact. She recently completed a three-year project with NASA on advanced alien intelligence as AI and serves as an advisor to Prism: the Partnership for Research into Sentient Machines.

She is a co-director of the MPCR Lab at FAU's new Gruber Sandbox, a research facility which builds AI systems informed by neuroscience and philosophy of mind. She appears frequently on television shows on stations such as PBS and The History Channel (see below for clips).  She writes opinion pieces for venues such as the New York Times, Scientific American, The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times.