Keynote
In person
LeadersGoldDiscovery

Painful intelligence: What AI can tell us about human suffering

  • Date
    8 July 2026
    Timeframe
    16:30 - 17:00
    Duration
    30 minutes
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      Hours
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    This talk introduces my recent e-book with the same title, freely available on arxiv and https://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/ahyvarin/painintl/. The book uses the modern theory of AI to understand human suffering or mental pain. Both humans and sophisticated AI agents process information about the world in order to achieve goals and obtain rewards, which is why AI can be used as a model of the human brain and mind. The book starts with the assumption that suffering is mainly caused by frustration. Frustration means the failure of an agent (whether AI or human) to achieve a goal or a reward it wanted or expected. Frustration is inevitable because of the overwhelming complexity of the world, limited computational resources, and scarcity of good data. In particular, such limitations imply that an agent acting in the real world must cope with uncontrollability, unpredictability, and uncertainty, which all lead to frustration. Such computational theory is finally used to derive various interventions or training methods that will reduce suffering in humans. The ensuing interventions are very similar to those proposed by Buddhist and Stoic philosophy, and include mindfulness meditation.

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