MLE Podcast Season 2 Episode 5

“An Enactive AI? Computing and Sense-Making Beyond the Data-Driven Approach” with Dr Luc Steels and Dr Takashi Ikegami 

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Deezer and Acast!

For this conversation on “Computing Differently”, MLE Podcast host, Dr Johanna Magin, sat down with two of the world’s preeminent researchers in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, and robotics — Dr Luc Steels and Dr Takashi Ikegami. Both of these researchers come at the question of AI from a decidedly divergent perspective — that of the enactive approach and participatory sense-making. The conversation was one of not just defining the current stakes of AI research, but of considering the outer reaches of each guest’s thinking about AI and defining some of the intractable questions in the field today.

• How close does the apparent sense-making of a robot come to human sense-making?
• What defines participatory sense-making as a distinctly human activity?
• Can there be such a thing as an “enactive AI”?
• If so, what insights might it afford us about human cognition, and about AI itself?
• How are we to apply appropriate caution when discussing the current frontiers of AI research? Where should its priorities be?
• How can we grapple with the very real dangers of AI already at hand, such as the hypernormativity of predictive systems which propagate harmful biases and drive information pollution?

Whether or not you feel you have a stake in the ongoing AI conversation, this conversation sheds light on so many of the fundamental questions of what it means to be a creative, enactive, and participatory being in the world today — in short, what it means to be human.