Anders Hedman
About
I am Associate Professor and Docent in the Department of Human-Centered Technology in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at KTH the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm Sweden. My work involves research, teaching and being a director of our Master Program in Interactive Media Technology. Background I have a background in philosophy, psychology and human-computer interaction. Much of my work is within human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence and philosophy of mind. I did my Bachelor's degree at UC Berkeley where I studied under Hubert Dreyfus and John Searle. In my Licentiate and Doctoral work I explored philsophical perspectives on Virtual Reality. I went back to Berkeley after my Ph. D. as a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Philosophy and started to write my book on Consciousness under the guidance of John Searle. I discovered that most work within the Philosophy of Mind and the Cognitive Neurosciences were based on a computationalist ideas. I took a critical perspective on computationalism in that text and argued instead for a causal biological approach to consciousness. I built largely on Searle's ideas of biological naturalism. Since then comptuationalism has become increasingly popular because of recent developments in AI. From 2008-10 I was a Seconded National Expert in the unit of Future and Emerging Technologies Open (FET Open), DGIFNSO, The European Comission. I worked there as a Project Officer and read hundreds of research proposals. FET Open was the only "bly sky" research unit at the time and accepted high-risk, radical, pathbreaking research proposals related to information technology. There were no specific calls, the proposals just had to be path breaking. I was able to make good use of my interdisiplinary background in philosophy, psychology and computer science in this unit where such skills were highly appreciated. I leared much, not only from reading proposals and writing consenses reports for expert evaluations of them, but also through interacting with other project officers who worked there. In contrast to other units in the EU, they were all experts in academic fields of research. Research I do research in human-centered AI, human-computer interaction and AI from a critical perspective. I am interested in the limits of AI and how to think about them. I take an intellectual history perspective on AI as in my teaching. I also build on the work of Hubert Dreyfus and John Searle. Dreyfus represents the phenomenological tradition and Searle the analytic. In my view they complement each other well. Within the phenomenological traidition I am, as Dreyfus was, also influenced by the philosopher Martin Heidgger. I am currently interested in finding explanatory models of large language models that can make them easier to understand. This work involves going deeper into technical aspects of AI to find concrete explanatory concepts. This is part of my overall project of trying to revitalize the philosohical critique that was largely driven by Searle and Dreyfus and explore new questions for our time that they never had a chance to explore. It is unfortunate that they are no longer active in a time when we need them more than ever. I found in my research that the critique of AI has largely moved from the philosophers to technology experts, popularizers of AI and eminent AI researchers. The external critique has diminished and the internal critique has largely taken its place. I try to show that this is a mistake and that we need the external philsophical critque now more than ever. Teaching Teaching AI is an important part of my work. I have been teaching my course AI in Society since 2020 and Generative AI together with Haibo Li since 2024. In 2024 I also taught a weeklong course on AI for Journalists and will teach it for a second time in 2025. I take a philosophical perspective on AI combined with intellectual history. I don't think it is possible to fully understand what AI is without examining how it has evolved historically and from a philosophical informed perspective. I build on the philosophers that I have studied under at UC Berkeley as part of my Bachelor's degree and when I was a Visiting Fellow: Dreyfus and Searle who have gone down in history as the foremost critics of AI. I also supervise several Master theses on AI each year, both within computer science and human-centered technology. Haibo Li and I have also taught Big Data since 2017 and here I focus on ethical issues. I also teach research methods for interactive media technology. I take a critical perspective on research methods with philosophy of science as a foundation. Public talks I regurlarly give talks on AI at conferences and in other fora and have appeared on TV, radio and been interviewed for magazines.