The UCLA Livescu Initiative on Neuro, Narrrative, and AI aims to change the conversation on the hot button issues like artificial intelligence, neural enhancement, or human and animal consciousness and to bring UCLA researchers into conversation with each other on these topics. Operating at the intersection of three areas of inquiry— Humanities, Neuroscience, and Engineering—the project has two aims:
- NNAI seeks to change the conversation 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 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, and the nature of cognition, affect, and emotion as well as knowledge of biological evolution, neurobiological structure, or abstract engineering and mathematical relations.
- NNAI brings curious scholars together to seed connections, communities and conversations on campus. We do this through faculty seminars, symposia and events, and research funding opportunities.
UCLA is a world-class university with thousands of faculty engaged in cutting edge research, but it can also be an anonymous place where it can be difficult to find opportunities, learn about new work and engage in intellectual debate. The Livescu Initiative fosters the kind of dialogue and interaction at the core of the academic mission.