On the present setting of the work.

What we exist to do.

Thinking About Thinking, Inc. is an independent non-profit organisation concerned with the interdisciplinary study of intelligence, broadly conceived and with the institutions through which that study is, or ought to be, conducted.

The empirical study of intelligence has, across the past decade, advanced substantially across artificial intelligence and machine learning; neuroscience and cognitive science; psychology, linguistics and the behavioural sciences; and the formal sciences that surround them. The institutional structures by which that progress is ordinarily integrated have not, on the whole, kept pace. The questions of greatest scientific consequence tend, in our experience, to sit between disciplines: they evolve faster than the societies organised to address them; they suffer disproportionately from inconsistent vocabulary and methodology; and they require new conceptual frameworks before they can be addressed with any seriousness. The work of this organisation is, in part, to attend to that asymmetry.

We pursue this through a small set of standing activities: peer-reviewed scientific meetings; a flagship summit on open problems in artificial intelligence; online seminar groups; an ambassador programme; a fellowship of researchers, engineers and practitioners distributed across more than 200 cities; and a small number of public-facing media projects. The aim, in each case, is to convene the relevant participants in person where possible and in correspondence otherwise and to maintain sustained, methodologically serious exchange between them.

Our role, more modestly, is to construct the shared intellectual infrastructure that, in our view, allows serious work to proceed: spaces for careful inquiry; venues for rigorous exchange; and a standing community to which contributors may, year after year, return.

Welcome to our Oasis.