EAG Talks – Details, episodes & analysis

According to one recent estimate, there are one sextillion animals on Earth that may be sentient, most living in the wild. Yet wild animal welfare is neglected by intergovernmental bodies such as the IPCC. This talk discusses the importance and difficulty of developing a framework for evaluating interventions targeted at improving wild animal welfare. It considers how a model recently developed by Rethink Priorities might be used to quantify wild animal welfare and discusses different theories of population value, identifying sources of uncertainty. It ends with a discussion of preventing the spread of wild animal suffering to other planets. Tim Campbell is a philosopher and research fellow at the Institute for Futures Studies (IFFS) in Stockholm and the Mimir Center for Long Term Futures Research. His research focuses on topics in ethics related to population change, personal identity over time, whole brain emulation, and, most recently, wild animal welfare.

Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6b7XRoaq8Q

Darren Margolias, Executive Director of ‪@BeastPhilanthropy‬, answers questions from EA Forum users, posted here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7QfKaF2bnCbuREJNx/ama-beast-philanthropy-s-darren-margolias/

Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ylphNrBjWI

This panel session brings representatives from three organizations implementing health interventions in Nigeria, sharing more about their interventions, experience, and critical lessons from their operation. Panelists concurred that data-driven decision-making, proper stakeholder engagement, and public-private partnerships are vital for intervention success. They emphasized the importance of contextual understanding, cultural sensitivity, and collaboration with local stakeholders to ensure effective implementation.

Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6M9kcNhI6Lo

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ERtJeac0Lh4

Description

In the aftermath of COVID-19, how do we prioritise long-term strategies for future pandemics amidst pressing domestic issues? Taking the UK as a focal point, Jasmin Kaur, Director of UK Advocacy at 1Day Sooner, analyses the challenges and policy tools for coordinating domestic and international bodies for policies that improve resilience to biothreats. The talk will explore the intricate interplay between international funders, academia, and policymakers in the context of human challenge trials. This talk is suitable for audience interested in areas such as policymaking, biosecurity and non-profit entrepreneurship.

Youtube description** (youtu.be/-YC-ZhdcVck):

This event took place on Tuesday September 5, 2023 and was hosted by the NYU Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program. About the event This panel discussion featured four authors from the recently released and widely discussed AI consciousness report. This report argues for, and exemplifies, a rigorous and empirically grounded approach to AI consciousness: assessing existing AI systems in detail, in light of the best-supported neuroscientific theories of consciousness.

The paper surveys several prominent scientific theories of consciousness, including recurrent processing theory, global workspace theory, higher-order theories, predictive processing, and attention schema theory. From these theories the authors derive "indicator properties" of consciousness, elucidated in computational terms that allow them to assess AI systems for these properties. They use these indicator properties to assess several recent AI systems, discuss how future systems might implement them, offered perspectives from philosophy, cognitive science, and computer science, and responded to questions and comments. About the panelists

Patrick Butlin is a philosopher of mind and cognitive science and a Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. His current research is on consciousness, agency and other mental capacities and attributes in AI. Robert Long is a Research Affiliate at the Center for AI Safety. He recently completed his PhD in philosophy at New York University, during which he also worked as a Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute. He works on issues related to possible AI consciousness and sentience. Yoshua Bengio is recognized worldwide as one of the leading experts in artificial intelligence, known for his conceptual and engineering breakthroughs in artificial neural networks and deep learning. He is a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at Université de Montréal and the Founder and Scientific Director of Mila – Quebec AI Institute, one of the world’s largest academic institutes in deep learning. He is also the Scientific Director of IVADO. His scientific contributions have earned him numerous awards. He is the 2018 laureate of the A.M. Turing Award, “the Nobel Prize of Computing,” alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun for their important contributions and advances in deep learning. In 2022, he was appointed Knight of the Legion of Honor by France and named co-laureate of Spain’s Princess of Asturias Award for technical and scientific research. Later that year, Professor Bengio became the most cited computer scientist in the world in terms of h-index. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and of Canada, an Officer of the Order of Canada and a Canadian CIFAR AI Chair. Grace Lindsay is currently an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Data Science at New York University. After a BS in neuroscience from the University of Pittsburgh and a year at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Freiburg, Germany, Grace got her PhD at the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia University in the lab of Ken Miller. Following that, she was a Sainsbury Wellcome Centre/Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit Research Fellow at University College London. About the host The NYU Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program is dedicated to advancing understanding of the consciousness, sentience, sapience, and moral, legal, and political status of nonhumans, including animals and artificial intelligences. We believe that all beings with the capacity to suffer deserve to be treated with respect and compassion, and that our policies and practices should reflect this. Our goal is to promote research and scholarship that will help to shape a more just and humane world for all.* *As it happens, this program description was co-authored by GPT-3, a large language model!

**Minimally edited for length by Aaron

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ld3_Sh5kTA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YL9mXXGm0Tw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0fjXW1-hXc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhGrDkPjzME

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-BCyEPV1Og