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
How did we get to today’s technology which now supports a trillion dollar AI industry? What were the key scientific breakthroughs? What were the surprises and dead-ends along the way...

How did we get to today’s technology which now supports a trillion dollar AI industry? What were the key scientific breakthroughs? What were the surprises and dead-ends along the way...
The African Olympiad Academy is a world-class high school dedicated to training Africa’s most promising students in mathematics, science, and artificial intelligence through olympiad-based pedagogy.

The African Olympiad Academy is a world-class high school dedicated to training Africa’s most promising students in mathematics, science, and artificial intelligence through olympiad-based pedagogy.
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.