HAI Weekly Seminar with Tobias Gerstenberg
Going Beyond the Here and Now: Counterfactual Simulation in Human Cognition
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Going Beyond the Here and Now: Counterfactual Simulation in Human Cognition
The rapid acceleration of AI comes with a profound wave of anxiety. Across every sector of society, people are facing unsettling questions about their worth and their place in a shifting world.

The rapid acceleration of AI comes with a profound wave of anxiety. Across every sector of society, people are facing unsettling questions about their worth and their place in a shifting world.
This session is specifically designed for full-time graduate students within one year of obtaining their PhD, as well as current postdoctoral scholars, fellows, and researchers.

This session is specifically designed for full-time graduate students within one year of obtaining their PhD, as well as current postdoctoral scholars, fellows, and researchers.
Save the Date. Artificial intelligence is transforming how researchers collect, analyze, and learn from data. As AI systems become increasingly integrated into scientific discovery, business decision-making, and policy analysis, they are reshaping both the questions researchers can ask and the methods they use to answer them.

Save the Date. Artificial intelligence is transforming how researchers collect, analyze, and learn from data. As AI systems become increasingly integrated into scientific discovery, business decision-making, and policy analysis, they are reshaping both the questions researchers can ask and the methods they use to answer them.
As humans, we spend much of our time going beyond the here and now. We dwell on the past, long for the future, and ponder how things could have turned out differently. In this talk, I will argue that people's knowledge of the world is organized around causally structured mental models, and that much of human thought can be understood as cognitive operations over these mental models. Specifically, I will highlight the pervasiveness of counterfactual thinking in human cognition. Counterfactuals are critical for how people make causal judgments, how they explain what happened, and how they hold others responsible for their actions.