Steve Sloman: Information to Bits at the Artificiality Summit 2024

At the Artificiality Summit in October 2024, Steve Sloman, professor at Brown University and author of The Knowledge Illusion and The Cost of Conviction, catalyzed a conversation about how we perceive knowledge in ourselves, others, and now in machines. What happens when our collective knowledge includes a community of machines? Steve challenged us to think about the dynamics of knowledge and understanding in an AI-driven world, about the evolving landscape of narratives, and ask the question can AI make us believe in ways that humans make us believe? What would it take for AI to construct a compelling ideology and belief system that humans would want to follow?

Bio: Steven Sloman has taught at Brown since 1992. He studies higher-level cognition. He is a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the American Psychological Society, the Eastern Psychological Association, and the Psychonomic Society. Along with scientific papers and editorials, his published work includes a 2005 book Causal Models: How We Think about the World and Its Alternatives, a 2017 book The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone co-authored with Phil Fernbach, and the forthcoming Righteousness: How Humans Decide from MIT Press. He has been Editor-in-Chief of the journal Cognition, Chair of the Brown University faculty, and created Brown’s concentration in Behavioral Decision Sciences.