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Margaret Boden on artificial intelligence

Jim Al-Khalili talks to Maggie Boden, a world authority in the field of AI, who explains why computers can provide answers to the philosophical mysteries of the human mind.

Maggie Boden is a world authority in the field of artificial intelligence - she even has a robot named in her honour.

Research Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex, Maggie has spent a lifetime attempting to answer philosophical questions about the nature of the human mind, but from a computational viewpoint.

"Tin cans", as she sometimes calls computers, are information processing systems, the perfect vehicle, she believes, to help us understand, explore and analyse the mind.

But questions about the human mind and the human person could never be answered within one single academic subject. So the long career of Maggie Boden is the very epitome of cross-disciplinary working. From medicine, to psychology, to cognitive and computer science, to technology and philosophy, Professor Boden has spent decades straddling multiple academic subjects, helping to create brand new disciplines along the way.

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28 minutes

Broadcasts

  • Tue 21 Oct 2014 09:00
  • Tue 21 Oct 2014 21:30

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