My research

I am a philosopher of cognitive science and AI ethicist, with specialisations in artificial intelligence and animal minds. Recurrent topics in my work include consciousness, creativity, intelligence, perception, short-term memory, and the psychological measurement of pain and suffering.

I am the Education Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, responsible for our two Masters levels courses, and Co-Director of the Kinds of Intelligence research programme.

Publications

  1. “Relating to Machines.” Oxford University Press Handbook of Generative AI (Eds. Andreas Engel, Sarah Hammer, Philipp Hacker).
  2. Shevlin (2024) “All too human? Identifying and mitigating ethical risks of Social AI.” Law, Ethics, & Technology.
  3. Shevlin (2024). “Imagination, Creativity, and Non-human animals.” Oxford University Press Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination and Creativity (eds. Amy Kind & Julia Langkau)
  4. Shevlin (2024). “Consciousness, Machines, and Moral Status.” Humans and Smart Machines as Partners in Thought (ed. Anna Strasser).
  5. Srivastava et al. (including Shevlin) (2024). “Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models.” Transactions on Machine Learning Research.
  6. Vervoort, Shevlin, Melnikov, & Alodjants (2022). “Deep Learning Applied to Scientific Discovery: A Hot Interface with Philosophy of Science.” Journal for General Philosophy of Science.
  7. Shevlin (2021). “Rethinking creative intelligence: comparative psychology and the concept of creativity.” European Journal for Philosophy of Science.
  8. Shevlin (2021). “General intelligence: an ecumenical heuristic for artificial consciousness research?” Journal of Artificial Intelligence & Consciousness.
  9. Shevlin (2021). “Non-human consciousness and the specificity problem.” Mind & Language.
  10. Shevlin (2021). “How could we know when a robot was a moral patient?” Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics.
  11. Shevlin (2020). “Which animals matter? Comparing psychological approaches to moral status in non-human systems.” Philosophical Topics.
  12. Shevlin (2020). “Current controversies in the cognitive science of short-term memory.” Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences.
  13. Crosby & Shevlin (2020). “Defining Artificial Intelligence: a reply to Wang.” Journal of Artificial General Intelligence.
  14. Shevlin & Friesen (2020). “Pain, Placebo, and Cognitive Penetration”. Mind & Language.
  15. “Qualia and ‘raw feels’.” (2019). In Introduction to Philosophy of Mind, H. Salazar (ed.).
  16. Shevlin, Vold, Crosby, & Halina (2019). “The Limits of Machine Intelligence.” EMBO Reports.
  17. Shevlin & Halina (2019). “Apply rich psychological terms in AI with care”. Nature Machine Intelligence, 1(4), 165–167.
  18. Bhatnagar et al. including Shevlin (2018). “Mapping Intelligence: Requirements and Possibilities”. In Muller, V. C., ed., Philosophy and Theory of Artificial Intelligence
  19. Shevlin (2017). “Conceptual Short-Term Memory: A Missing Part of the Mind?” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 24(7–8), 163–188.
  20. Shevlin (2017). “The Lower Bounds of Desire”. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 24(5–6), 251– 258.

Select public writing

“What if Artificial Intelligence saves the planet?” The New European (cover article)

“The artist is dead, AI killed them” (2022). iai.tv.

“GPT-3: A Digital Remix of Humanity” (2020). Daily Nous.

“AI reflections in 2019” (2020). Nature Machine Intelligence.

“A Lack of Understanding: Storytelling for Robots” (2019). Litro Magazine.

“Brutality Is Common in Video Games, but Not Sexual Violence. Why?” (2018). Aeon.

Doctoral and Masters theses

Consciousness, Perception, and Short-Term Memory (Doctoral Thesis)

Linking phenomenal and access consciousness: a case for sparse representations (BPhil thesis)

© Henry Shevlin 2015