NYU launched the Center for Mind, Ethics and Policy with a $6 million endowment to research the consciousness of non-human minds, including animals and artificial intelligence, at the start of the semester. The center will replace the College of Arts & Science’s Mind, Ethics and Policy Program in the Environmental Studies department.
Founder and director Jeff Sebo, an Environmental Studies professor at NYU, said that the CMEP is working to assess AI and animal consciousness as well as perceptions of emotions by comparing their anatomy and behavior to those of humans.
“We are ultimately one kind of being with one kind of mind, living in a world with millions of other kinds of beings,” Sebo said. “We have a lot of bias and ignorance and a lot of power and control, and that is usually a recipe for disaster.”
When the MEP program was created in 2022, most people recognized that mammals and birds were likely to be sentient, but were skeptical of other animals, Sebo said. Before it was endowed as a center earlier this summer, the program held several panels and discussions with experts about animal and AI consciousness. The CMEP will be co-sponsoring a conference in October to analyze the status of animals in egalitarian scholarship with Duke’s Center for Law, Economics and Public Policy.
In an interview with WSN, Toni Sims, a researcher at the CMEP who also works with the university’s Wild Animal Welfare Program, said that researching AI consciousness has been a “major focus” and that the CMEP plans to release a “long report on that soon.”
“We’re not arguing that ChatGPT is conscious right now, but looking more into the future, could AI eventually be conscious?” Sims said. “What sort of timeline are we looking at, and how are we going to change our thinking — and maybe our treatment of AI systems and laws and policies —to make sure that we treat them as we would want to treat any conscious being?”
The CMEP received a $5 million donation from the Navigation Fund, a nonprofit that funds initiatives for AI safety and animal welfare, and $1 million from Polaris Ventures, another nonprofit that invests in projects that aim to build “compassion for all sentient beings.” NYU said the endowment “fueled” the MEP program’s growth into the CMEP in a June press release announcing the center’s establishment.
Sebo also helped create NYU’s New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness in April, which has garnered 480 signatories and states that there is scientific evidence supporting the presence of consciousness in animals and said it would be “irresponsible” for humans to ignore that.
Kristin Andrews, a philosophy professor at York University, called the CMEP “a game changer for research in animal mind and cognition” in an interview with WSN, saying that “we don’t have anything like this in the world.”
“We’ve got a ton of great science happening, and then we’ve got a lot of ethics happening and policy happening, but these are all separate projects,” Andrews said. “The center is the first time we have all three of these areas of research being brought together — allowing for these deep conversations that will inform both the research within the three separate disciplines — but will also create something radically new in our thinking about why we need to include discussions of animals when we’re making policy decisions.”
Contact Josh Furman at [email protected].