Selmer Bringsjord

Director, Rensselaer AI & Reasoning Lab; Professor, Cognitive Science and Computer Science Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

  • Troy NY

Expert in logic and philosophy, specializing in AI and reasoning

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Spotlight

2 min

Could Smarter Guns Be the Key To Stopping Mass Shootings and Other Violence?

“Gun violence in this country is an epidemic, and it’s an international embarrassment,” President Biden recently said. At least 45 mass shootings have occurred in America in the last month, according to reports. In the same time period, news of police officers killing unarmed Black men and boys, including 20-year-old Daunte Wright in Minneapolis and 13-year-old Adam Toledo in Chicago, sparked waves of protest around the country. These all-too-common tragedies could be significantly reduced — and even eliminated — without any of the partisan rancor and gridlock typically associated with gun-related debates, says Selmer Bringsjord, an expert in artificial intelligence and reasoning and a professor of cognitive science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “There is a solution,” Bringsjord, the director of the Rensselaer AI and Reasoning Laboratory, wrote in the Times Union. “A technological alternative to the fruitless shouting match between politicians: namely, AI — of the ethical sort. Guns that are at once intelligent and ethically correct can put an end to the mass-shooting carnage.” Rather than an endless debate over whether the public should have more guns or less, Bringsjord’s novel – and, he says, plausible – proposal is to shift to “smart and virtuous guns, and intelligent restraining devices that operate in accord with ethics, and the law.” Along with his coauthors, Bringsjord detailed his ideas in a recent paper, “AI Can Stop Mass Shootings, and More.” Anticipating some counterarguments, the authors urge readers “to at least contemplate whether we are right, and whether, if we are, such AI is worth seeking.” Bringsjord and his collaborators have created simulations showing how, in only 2.3 seconds, ethical AI technology can perceive a human’s intent and environment and then, if necessary, prevent their gun from firing. Importantly, he notes, the same technology that could prevent a criminal from opening fire in a public area could also prevent a police officer from shooting a person who posed no threat. “Ultimately research along this line should enable humans, in particular some human police, to simply be replaced by machines that, as a matter of ironclad logic, cannot do wrong,” Bringsjord said in a recent public radio segment. The AI capabilities discussed by Bringsjord are the product of prior work over seven years of funding from the Office of Naval Research devoted to developing moral competence in robots. Bringsjord has spoken about robots and logic at TEDxLimassol. He is the author of What Robots Can and Can’t Be and Superminds: People Harness Hypercomputation. He is also the co-author of Artificial Intelligence and Literary Creativity: Inside the Mind of Brutus, a Storytelling Machine. Bringsjord is available to speak about his recent proposals around AI-enabled guns, as well as other aspects of AI, human and machine reasoning, and formal logic.

Selmer Bringsjord

2 min

The Gun Control Debate is at a Stalemate. Can Smarter Weapons Help to Solve it?

The gun control debate is at a stalemate. America seems incapable of finding common ground on background checks, waiting periods, weapons registries and restrictions or bans on select weapons. Shooting after shooting has resulted in decades of debate but little substantive change. But Professor Selmer Bringsjord from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who recently weighed in on the issue, presented a concept that could turn the entire topic on its head by using artificial intelligence. Bringsjord accepts that America won’t get rid of its guns – so why not just make our guns smarter?  Ethically AI-enabled weapons can put American politicians back to work by shifting the debate from the weapons we should ban, to the targets we will accept. Do we allow guns to kill school children, shoppers, concert-goers? The technology of ethical AI changes the conversation.   His idea was just recently published in the Times Union: “Yet there is a solution, a technological alternative to the fruitless shouting match between politicians: namely, AI — of an ethical sort. Guns that are at once intelligent and ethically correct can put an end to the mass-shooting carnage. Consider the rifle apparently used by the human killer in the El Paso Walmart shooting. But now suppose that time is turned back to before his shots were fired on Aug. 3, and that his rifle, radically unlike the stupid one that killed, is both intelligent and ethical. This alternate-future rifle would know that it's approaching the Walmart by car and would accordingly know that it has no business being used anytime soon. Move forward in time a bit; the rifle is now in the hands of the aspiring, ear-muffed killer outside his car; but his weapon has fully disengaged itself and is locked into a mode of utter uselessness with the finality of a sealed bank vault. On the other hand, the guns in the hands of law enforcement officers who have dashed on scene know in whose hands they rest, and accordingly know that if they are trained on the would-be killer, they have every right to work well, if this criminal reveals some new threat. Notice: If people who don't actually pose a threat sufficient to warrant being shot by police can't be shot by smart, ethical guns, a fact that could lead to the welcome evaporation of a different but also vitriolic political shouting match.” -Times Union, August 16, 2019 Could AI be the answer to America’s gun problem? It’s truly a new perspective on an old issue. If you are a reporter covering this topic, let our experts help with your story. Dr. Selmer Bringsjord is the Chair of the Department of Cognitive Science expert in logic and philosophy, specializing in AI and reasoning. Dr. Bringsjord regularly speaks with media about AI and is available to speak about the concept of intelligent, ethical guns. Simply click on his icon to arrange an interview.

Selmer Bringsjord

Areas of Expertise

Artifical Intelligence
Philosophical Foundations of AI
Computational Economics
AI Systems
Formal Logic
Computational Logic

Biography

Selmer Bringsjord specializes in the logico-mathematical and philosophical foundations of artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive science, and in collaboratively building AI systems on the basis of computational logic. Though he spends considerable “engineering" time in pursuit of ever-smarter computing machines, he claims that “armchair" reasoning time has enabled him to deduce that the human mind will forever be superior to such machines.

"Soon enough, much of what many humans do for a living will be better done by indefatigable machines who require not a cent in pay,” Bringsjord said. “I figure the ultimate growth industry will be building smarter and smarter such machines on the one hand, and philosophizing about whether they are truly conscious and free on the other. Job security is nice. I've worked in this two-fold industry for a long time, and plan to continue as long as my health holds out."

Bringsjord is the author of papers and essays ranging in approach from the mathematical to the informal, and covering such areas as AI, logic, gaming, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, robotics, and ethics and he has of late begun to move into the area of computational economics, for which he has invented a new paradigm based on formal logic.

He is the author of What Robots Can & Can't Be, concerned with the future of attempts to create robots that behave as humans, and also Superminds: People Harness Hypercomputation, and More. Before the second of these books he wrote, with IBM's David Ferrucci, Articial Intelligence and Literary Creativity: Inside the Mind of Brutus, A Storytelling Machine.

Bringsjord currently holds appointments in the Department of Cognitive Science, the Department of Computer Science, and the Lally School of Management & Technology, and teaches AI, formal logic, human and machine reasoning, philosophy of AI, other topics relating to formal logic, and the intellectual history of New York City and the Hudson Valley. Funding for his research and development has come from the Luce Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Templeton Foundation, AT&T, IBM, Apple, AFRL, ARDA/DTO/IARPA, ONR, DARPA, AFOSR, and other sponsors. Bringsjord has consulted to and advised many companies in the general realm of intelligent systems, and continues to do so.

Education

Brown University

PhD

Philosophy

University of Pennsylvania

BA

Philosophy

Media Appearances

How to Slow Down Time

Popular Science  print

2021-12-08

...Challenge yourself and engage your brain

For Selmer Bringsjord, a professor of logic and philosophy, as well as director of the Rensselaer Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning Laboratory, the longest days often involve spending time tackling problems known in mathematical computer science to be lengthy, difficult solves. ...

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Can AI Teach Us To Be More Human? Maybe.

Lifewire  online

2021-04-16

... At Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Selmer Bringsjord’s laboratory is building mathematical models of human emotion. The research is intended to create an AI that can score high on emotional intelligence tests and apply them to humans. But Bringsjord, an AI expert, says any teaching AI does is inadvertent.

"But this is pure engineering work, and I'm under no such illusion that the AI in question, itself has emotions or genuinely understands emotions," he said in an email interview.

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Conciencia robótica: Sentir y razonar como humano

Al límite de la ficción  tv

2021-04-01

Selmer Bringsford and his doctoral student, Mike Giancola, of the Rensselaer Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning (RAIR) Laboratory discuss whether robots and AI can feel and think like a human in "Al límite de la ficción," a multi-part science series from the Chilean news channel, T13.

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Articles

Beyond the Doctrine of Double Effect: A Formal Model of True Self-sacrifice

Robotics and Well Being

Naveen Sundar Govindarajulu, Selmer Bringsjord, Rikhiya Ghosh, Matthew Peveler

2019

The doctrine of double effect (DDE) is an ethical principle that can account for human judgment in moral dilemmas: situations in which all available options have large good and bad consequences. We have previously formalized DDE in a computational logic that can be implemented in robots. DDE, as an ethical principle for robots, is attractive for a number of reasons: (1) Empirical studies have found that DDE is used by untrained humans; (2) many legal systems use DDE; and finally, (3) the doctrine is a hybrid of the two major opposing families of ethical theories (consequentialist/utilitarian theories versus deontological theories). In spite of all its attractive features, we have found that DDE does not fully account for human behavior in many ethically challenging situations. Specifically, standard DDE fails in situations wherein humans have the option of self-sacrifice. Accordingly, we present an enhancement of our DDE -formalism to handle self-sacrifice; we end by looking ahead to future work.

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Toward the Engineering of Virtuous Machines

Preprint

Naveen Sundar Govindarajulu, Selmer Bringsjord, Rikhiya Ghosh

2018

While various traditions under the 'virtue ethics' umbrella have been studied extensively and advocated by ethicists, it has not been clear that there exists a version of virtue ethics rigorous enough to be a target for machine ethics (which we take to include the engineering of an ethical sensibility in a machine or robot itself, not only the study of ethics in the humans who might create artificial agents). We begin to address this by presenting an embryonic formalization of a key part of any virtue-ethics theory: namely, the learning of virtue by a focus on exemplars of moral virtue. Our work is based in part on a computational formal logic previously used to formally model other ethical theories and principles therein, and to implement these models in artificial agents.

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Tentacular Artificial Intelligence, and the Architecture Thereof, Introduced

Preprint

Selmer Bringsjord, Naveen Sundar Govindarajulu, Atriya Sen, Matthew Peveler, Biplav Srivastava, Kartik Talamadupula

2018

We briefly introduce herein a new form of distributed, multi-agent artificial intelligence, which we refer to as "tentacular." Tentacular AI is distinguished by six attributes, which among other things entail a capacity for reasoning and planning based in highly expressive calculi (logics), and which enlists subsidiary agents across distances circumscribed only by the reach of one or more given networks.

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