THE IDEA
Operating at the intersection of three areas of inquiry— Humanities, Neuroscience, and Engineering—the project has two aims:
1) The UCLA Livescu initiative on Neuro, Narrative, and Artificial Intelligence (NNAI) seeks to stimulate conversation and thinking with a mix of curiosity, debate, and skepticism. Hot-button topics like artificial intelligence or neural enhancement often come pre-formatted by the media, corporate interests, and often academics as well, as something so radically new and so technically complex that, supposedly, no one knows anything about them.
NNAI Livescu reframes such debates by eliciting the significant expertise across the humanities that has long dealt with the question of thinking, issues of humanism, human transformation and even the very categories of the human and the non-human. NNAI is particularly focused on issues of cognition, intelligence, the relation of the natural and the artificial, the ethical and moral questions of agency and states of mind, and the nature of cognition, affect, and emotion. We ground these questions in a curiosity about and knowledge of biological evolution, neurobiological structure, and abstract engineering and mathematical relations currently being investigated.
2) NNAI Livescu is a forum where curious scholars can seed connections, communities and share conversations on neuro, narrative and AI. Our multidisciplinary approach welcomes experts from different fields to discuss central issues of humanism and human and non-human thinking. The Livescu Initiative leads with the multi-stranded traditions of philosophy, broadly and inclusively defined, and brings old questions to bear on new fields.
Livescu Foundation
NNAI Livescu is funded by the Livescu Foundation, which purpose is to promote, give grants or donations mostly to nonprofit organizations such as public universities and nonprofit research groups focused on futures studies, AI as part of human civilization, cryptocurrencies complement to State monopolies of finances, psychohistory, genetics, comparative literature and human space colonization among others.
Institute for Society and Genetics
NNAI Livescu is part of the Institute for Society and Genetics (ISG) at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA, a world-class university with thousands of faculty engaged in cutting edge research. We strive to connect diverse disciplines by breaking down communication silos, promoting a unified exchange of ideas, as well as to present an original and creative contribution in an international context.
Check the blog post by our director Christopher Kelty for more details on the ideas behind the NNAI Livescu initiative.