CASHE X NY AI: AI & Alien Minds—Thinking About Minds That Don’t Think Like Ours

Join members from both CASHE and NY AI, in a single event, for an open-format discussion on some of the most pressing and profound questions of our time. This won’t be a formal presentation—just a thoughtful gathering of minds exploring ideas that matter.

From chatbots to UFOs, we’re surrounded by speculation about minds we don’t understand. But what does it mean to call something a “mind” at all—especially when it didn’t evolve the way we did?

In this open discussion session, we’ll explore the kinds of psychology—real or imagined—that people attribute to artificial and extraterrestrial intelligence. How do we judge what counts as intelligent, agentic, or moral when we’re dealing with something that may not think, feel, or reason the way we do?

Could the AI alignment problem be just one version of a broader challenge—the challenge of coexisting with non-human minds? And if so, are we using the right frameworks to think about alien intelligence, or are we just projecting our own assumptions?

We’ll consider questions like:

• Would we even recognize a non-human mind if we encountered one?
• Are we more afraid of minds that are too different from ours, or ones that are too similar?
• Is it possible to build empathy or alignment with something that doesn’t share our biology, emotions, or evolutionary history?
• Could AI safety and alien contact be part of the same deeper problem: how to think about minds that don’t think like us?

This won’t be a lecture. I’ll offer a brief intro and framing, and then we’ll open it up for freeform discussion. Bring your questions, your theories, your sci-fi references, and your curiosity.