Consciousness and COVID-19 with Yoshua Bengio

Today we're joined by one of, if not the most cited computer scientist in the world, Yoshua Bengio. Yoshua is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at the University of Montreal and the Founder and Scientific Director of MILA. We caught up with Yoshua just a few weeks into the coronavirus pandemic, so we spend a bit of time discussing his work both broadly on the impact of AI in society, as well as his current endeavor in building a COVID-19 tracing application, and the use of ML to propose experimental candidate drugs. We also explore his work on consciousness, including how Yoshua defines consciousness, his paper "The Consciousness Prior," the relationship between consciousness and intelligence, how attention could be used to train consciousness, the current state of consciousness research, and how he sees it evolving.