Machine Consciousness? Get Real! // Ron Chrisley // AI in Production 2025

Ron Chrisley is Professor of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Sussex, where he is also Director of the Centre for Cognitive Science (COGS). He has been researching at the intersection of AI, cognitive science and philosophy for four decades. After getting his BS from Stanford in 1987 he investigated symbolic and neural-network based AI at NASA, Xerox PARC, the Helsinki University of Technology (as a Fulbright scholar), ATR Labs in Japan, and at the University of Birmingham (as a Leverhulme fellow) . In 1992 he took up a lectureship in the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences at the University of Sussex, and was awarded a DPhil from the University of Oxford in 1997. In 2019 he was a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Human-Centered AI at Stanford University. In 2021 he co-founded the generative voice AI startup Tenyx, which was acquired by Salesforce in September of 2024.