Susan Lynn Schneider is an American philosopher and artificial intelligence expert.

She is the founding director of the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University where she also holds the William F. Dietrich Distinguished Professorship.

[6] In addition she has done research at the Australian National University,[7][3] the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey[8] and at the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics at Yale University[7][3] At the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. she has held the Distinguished Scholar chair and the Baruch S. Blumburg NASA Chair in Astrobiology, Exploration and Technological innovation.

She emphasizes that people must make careful choices to ensure that sentient beings – whether human or android – flourish.

Schneider argues that failing to understand fundamental philosophical issues will jeopardize the beneficial use of AI and brain enhancement technology, and may lead to the suffering or death of conscious beings.

[18][19][20][16] In her work on the mind-body problem, she argues against physicalism, maintaining a monistic position and offering, in a series of papers, several novel anti-physicalist arguments.

[13][24] Her reason for the claim that the most intelligent aliens will be "postbiological" is called the "short window observation."

The short-window supposition holds that by the time any society learns to transmit radio signals, they're likely just a few hundred years from upgrading their own biology.

[9] She defends a view in which mental symbols are the basic vocabulary items composing the language of thought.

This test was developed far before the first artificial intelligence were made and does not answer the true question of consciousness.

The machine will be tested on its ability to have philosophical ideas and thoughts, whether it thinks of the afterlife and whether we have a soul or not etc.

[28][34][35][36][37][38][39] Schneider has been featured on television shows on BBC World News,[16] The History Channel, Fox News, PBS, and the National Geographic Channel,[28] and appears in the feature film, Supersapiens: the Rise of the Mind by Markus Mooslechner.