Susan Schneider

Susan Schneider is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. She is a Distinguished Scholar at the U.S. Library of Congress, a professor at The University of Connecticut, a faculty member in the Ethics and Technology Group at the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, and a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She is also a recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award.Schneider contends that the most intelligent alien beings we encounter will be postbiological in nature, being forms of artificial intelligence, that they would be superintelligent, and that we can predict the shape of some of these superintelligences would be like. Her reason for the claim that the most intelligent aliens will be postbiological is called the short window observation.” This holds that by the time any society learns to transmit radio signals, theyre likely just a few hundred years from upgrading their own biology.Schneider defends a view of the nature of the mental symbols (where such are the basic vocabulary items in the language of thought). She then used this conception of symbols, together with certain work on the nature of meaning, to construct a theory of the nature of concepts. The basic theory of concepts is intended to be ecumenical, having a version that applying in the case of connectionism, as well as versions that apply to both the prototype theory and definitions view of concepts.Discussions of Schneiders work have appeared in The New York Times, Wired Magazine, Smithsonian, Big Think, 3 Quarks Daily, Discover Magazine, Science Magazine, Motherboard, Slate, Popular Mechanics, and more.

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