PERSON
Susan Schneider
The philosopher of mind who insists that the deepest questions raised by artificial intelligence—whether machines can be conscious, whether uploading is survival or death—are not engineering problems but metaphysical ones, and that getting them wrong could be lethal.
Susan Schneider is the philosopher the artificial intelligence industry most needs and most resists. Trained at Rutgers under Jerry Fodor in the tradition of the
computational theory of mind, she absorbed a framework that treats the mind as a system of representations—and then turned that framework's rigor onto questions her peers preferred to defer. Her central claim is deceptively simple: the questions surrounding
consciousness and personal identity in an AI age are not technical problems that progress will dissolve but philosophical problems that progress sharpens, and the cost of ignoring them is not embarrassment but potentially the suffering or death of conscious beings. The founding director of the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University and former Baruch Blumberg NASA Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress, Schneider has refused both the triumphal merger narratives of the technologists and the breezy dismissals of critics who assume the question of machine consciousness is already settled.