What it is
Our Mission
Operating at the intersection of three areas of inquiry— Humanities, Neuroscience, and Engineering—the project has two aims:
- 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 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. - NNAI 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.
NNAI 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.
Livescu Foundation
The purpose of Livescu Foundation 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, human space colonization.
What we do
Research
NNAI aims to locate innovative, critical and unconventional research possibilities, at the edges of AI, neuroscience, cognition etc. Especially where humanities approaches are central and represent a perhaps risky or novel departure from the usual investigations. As a project devoted to raising the intellectual tenor of current debates, we especially support proposals that intervene in ideas beyond a single discipline or topical debate. NNAI supports proposals that forge new concepts, approaches and questions as well as supporting the excellence of work that is already ongoing. We value a collective cross-discipline cultivation of research ideas that include faculty seminars, public lectures, events or symposiums, and ultimately lead to funding undergraduate, graduate students, or post-doctoral research projects.
Community
NNAI is devoted to fostering dialogue and creative, unconventional innovation. Universities remain places driven by narrow disciplinary specialization, buried in the sedimentary layers of department culture and bureaucratic gridlock: NNAI aims to counterbalance this by providing a place for faculty and students to interact, think, tinker with ideas and questions, ask dumb questions and also very smart ones not asked elsewhere in the university. We foster this community through the deliberate and surprisingly hard work of getting people into a room together, finding opportunities for innovation or fostering a mutual respect for different approaches to the problems facing us today, and in the past.
Who we are
NNAI activities are supported by the Livescu Foundation and staff in the Institute for Society and Genetics and the Division of Life Sciences at UCLA.
Our activities are overseen by a Board of Advisors made up of faculty from several UCLA departments.