James Evans Lecture

When: 2024-04-01 16:00-18:00 (Tallinn time)
Where: online

The event is public via zoom: https://zoom.us/j/94927755198?pwd=VWpWU25DY1JlVFJsbDF4aUtyL3Zvdz09
Website: https://macss.uchicago.edu/directory/James-Evans

Title – From Simulated Subjectivity to Collective Consciousness in Large Language Models

Abstract – Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the automated understanding and understanding of human language, code, images, video, and other sensory data. In this talk, I begin by discussing research into how LLMs can measure and more or less accurately simulate the subjectivity of human agents, their social interactions, and their interactions with AI. I further demonstrate how we can model and assemble usefully diverse collectives of simulated human and alien agents to serve science, culture, and society. I then propose a new model of collective cognition and knowledge, and introduce novel LLM architectures designed to move us from simulated subjectivities to LLM agents collectively “conscious” of their shared situation, others, and the world. I conclude with a discussion of how we can deploy such agents to automate their evolution, learn from their differences, audit and regulate one another to augment human understanding and collective capacity.

Additional information – James Evans is the Director of the Knowledge Lab and Max Palevsky Professor in Sociology at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on the collective system of thinking and knowing, ranging from the distribution of attention and intuition, the origin of ideas and shared habits of reasoning to processes of agreement (and dispute), accumulation of certainty (and doubt), and the texture — novelty, ambiguity, topology — of human understanding. He is especially interested in innovation — how new ideas and practices emerge — and the role that social and technical institutions (e.g., the Internet, markets, collaborations) play in collective cognition and discovery.