Lakatos Award Lecture by Nicholas Shea (University of London/University of Oxford): Making Good Decisions with a Very Human Brain

Lakatos Award Lecture
6.00pm, Thursday 9 March 2023, Old Theatre, Old Building, LSE

Who makes better decisions? Computers or humans?  It takes two types of cognitive process, and for now, the human brain still has the edge …

Artificial neural networks using massively parallel processing are beating us at tasks like classifying images, playing strategic games and even naturalistic conversation. Far beyond passing the Turing test, when conversing with one of these chatbots it is barely credible that you are not dealing with a human being. This new technology will be transformative, but are these machines thinking like us? Not exactly, and the errors they make are revealing. They are good at weighing many different factors at once but, despite being trained on nearly all the information on the internet, step-by-step reasoning – at the heart of the more familiar ‘classical’ computer – is not their forte. Humans can move flexibly back and forth between the two kinds of cognitive process. For now, at least, as we shall see, to make good decisions, we still need to rely on the peculiar abilities of the very human brain.

The Lakatos Award is given annually for an outstanding contribution to the philosophy of science. Nicholas Shea won the 2020 Lakatos Award for his book, Representation in Cognitive Science. He is Professor of Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, University of London.