Dillon Plunkett

Hi, I'm Dillon. I'm a cognitive scientist interested in both biological and artificial minds.

I'm currently the Chief Scientist at Eleos AI Research, where I lead the organization's empirical research on the sentience and moral status of AI systems.

I believe that AI systems are likely to have a transformative impact on human civilization in the next few decades, which could be either enormously beneficial or catastrophically harmful for life on Earth. I also believe it is possible that we could soon be sharing the world with sentient AI systems whose well-being is worth taking into account. My work is focused on preparing us.

Before joining Eleos, I was an Anthropic Fellow and a postdoc in the Subjectivity Lab. I did my PhD in cognitive neuroscience in Josh Greene's lab at Harvard, and my BA in philosophy, also at Harvard.

I've done research on whether AI systems can report their own internal processes, how the human mind represents and predicts changes, how the human brain translates ideas between words and images, what we can learn from moral psychology research, how people use statistical clues to infer causal relationships, whether recreating your brain recreates you or merely a copy of you, and more.

In addition to research, I'm passionate about wilderness conservation, animal welfare, all varieties of science, and collaborative and team games. My favorite color is purple.

You can find all of my papers here. You can reach me by email at [my first name]@eleosai.org.