King's Institute for Human and Synthetic Minds presents Futures of Mind, a conference on mind and meaning. We host discussions across disciplines and expertise on the relationship between the technology and the mind. 

Ali Hossaini - 'Culturally Competent AI'

In keeping with the term ‘artificial intelligence’, our understanding of AI focuses on cognition. Here engineers have inherited a philosophic disposition, enshrined in Descartes’ famous cogito ('I think, therefore I am'), that emphasises thought, narrowly conceived as symbolic representation, over the range of activities that constitute meaning. As we deploy agentic AI – the delegation of decision-making to autonomous machines – regulations based on cognition are faltering. To develop AI which functions ethically and appropriately in a range of social contexts, I argue we need to introduce the concept of agency, which has multiple context-dependent meanings. I conclude that safe, trustworthy AI relies on a taxonomy of agency that defines the term across a variety of domains: technical, legal, political, psychological and biological.

Sanjay Modgil - Truth and Meaning: A Techno-Philosophical Perspective

The recently coined term ‘technophilosophy’ encompasses both the established field of philosophy of technology and a growing line of inquiry that revisits traditional philosophical problems in light of contemporary technological developments, particularly in artificial intelligence. In this talk I propose a broad-brush account of truth and meaning that is informed by recent work in the cognitive sciences and is rooted in the pragmatist tradition in philosophy. I argue that this framework not only offers a theoretically illuminating perspective on these concepts, but also addresses a pressing normative question: how we ought to conceptualise truth and meaning in anticipation of the transformative impact of AI on human practices and forms of life.

Stefan Sarkadi - "The Evolution of Deception: From Minds to Machines"

Deception—ranging from subtle misinformation to strategic disinformation—has become a defining challenge for contemporary societies, particularly as human decision-making increasingly intertwines with artificial intelligence (AI). While deception has long been studied in philosophy, psychology, economics and political science, we still lack a unified understanding of how deceptive behaviour emerges, spreads and can be contained under competitive pressures in hybrid human–machine societies, as well as in synthetic minds. In this talk, I will present an integrative, evolutionary perspective on deception by drawing on a series of agent-based and evolutionary meta-game-theoretic models that treat information and knowledge as public goods. A central theme of the talk is the dual role of cognition and human-machine institutions. Higher-order social reasoning, such as Theory of Mind, enables more effective deception, yet it is also essential for detecting, investigating and regulating dishonest behaviour.

Gabriele Salciute Civiliene, Matthew Reynolds, Marcel Karnapke - 'Language and / as Machine' (discussion and demo)

The discussion is built on two provocative premises about language and its relation to machines. On the one hand, language and machine are not the same. Technology keeps failing to dominate so-called natural languages but to some extent technology creates its own language as well as its own use of natural languages. On the other hand, machine is implicit in how our languages have evolved to be expressed and represented. The distinction between natural and artificial languages is constructed; their relation is far more porous than the semantic distinction allows us to see. There is a degree of artificiality in natural languages while artificial languages are evolving as much as human-spoken languages.

The discussion will be followed by a demo in which Marcel Karnapke (CyberRäuber) gives audible form to this porous boundary. He invites the audience to witness the birth of a novel synthetic language—a machine/human hybrid—and to experience the collapsing distinction between natural and artificial communication first-hand as an acoustic XR experience.

About presenters

• Dr Ali Hossaini is a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at King’s College London. The New York Times describes Ali Hossaini as ‘a biochemist turned philosopher turned television producer turned visual poet’. He founded National Gallery X, a King’s partnership that explores the future of art and technology, and Connected Culture, an action research programme that developed cultural applications for 5G. Hossaini’s genre-spanning career includes engineering standards, creative installations and strategic planning. His work on agency began when security think tank RUSI asked him to model potential threats from AI.
• Dr Sanjay Modgil is a Reader in AI at the Department of Informatics, King's College London, and a visiting Professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of Milan. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of formal logic, argumentation and dialogue, and the philosophy and ethics of AI. See this page for more details of his research, teaching and media work.
• Dr Stefan Sarkadi is a Research Fellow in the Department of Informatics at King's College London and an Associate Researcher at Inria Sophia-Antipolis. Stefan's research interests lie at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and deception, an increasingly complex socio-cognitive phenomenon that is difficult to detect and reason about. His work tackles the integration of techniques from AI and deception analysis to generate narratives about multi-agent interactions in complex systems. The aim for this ultimately is to help intelligence analysts infer the best explanation against artificial sources.
• Dr Gabriele Salciute Civiliene SFHEA, Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, King’s College London, specialises in digital visual innovation and immersive technologies for intellectual and cultural heritage. She is the founder of the Un.censor.ing network and XR and Attention Research Group at King’s Digital Futures Institute, and leads Distant Reading across Languages / DRaL, VR Ethnography and Literature across Languages / VR-ELL and curatorial initiatives “Ukraine: Architectures of Despair and Hope” / “KCL Films for Ukraine.”
• Prof Matthew Reynolds is Professor of English and Comparative Criticism and Chair of the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation (OCCT) Research Centre and a fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford. Among his books is Prismatic Jane Eyre: Close Reading a World Novel across Languages (2023) with its associated project website. His project on Artificial Intelligence, Decoloniality and Creative Poetry Translation explores the potential of Large Language Models to work across all sorts of language variety, and Translationlity: Literature Across Languages, his book-in-progress for OUP's 21st-Century Approaches series, reframes translation as something that happens through a continuum of language difference.
• Marcel Karnapke is media artist, developer, director and co-founder of the CyberRäuber collective, pioneering the convergence of Artificial Intelligence, XR, and classical theatre to create new "hyperstages". Formerly a researcher at the University of Cambridge on the 3D-Pitoti project, he transforms prehistoric cultural heritage into immersive digital narratives. His innovative work in theatre technology was awarded the prestigious German theatre prize "Der Faust" in 2024.