The Promise and Perils of Artificial Intelligence, on Zoom
with Susan Schneider and Stuart Russell

This meeting will take place over Zoom. To receive an invitation to the meeting, please sign up using the Eventbrite link below. You will receive an invitation and a link to Zoom two days before the event.

TECH AND THE CITY SERIES, co-sponsored by the Goethe-Institut San Francisco and Gray Area

 

The Goethe-Institut is the cultural institute of the Federal Republic of Germany with a global reach. We promote knowledge of the German language abroad and foster international cultural cooperation. We convey a comprehensive image of Germany by providing information about cultural, social and political life in our nation. Our cultural and educational programmes encourage intercultural dialogue and enable cultural involvement. They strengthen the development of structures in civil society and foster worldwide mobility.

 

Gray Area is San Francisco's leading media art center, merging art, science and technology towards social transformation. Their new initiative Patch responds to the ongoing global crisis by bringing the creative community online to explore new ways of connecting, learning, and preserving intimacy through live streaming, online education, and virtual spaces. Learn more at patch.grayarea.org

 

Buy books online at www.alexanderbook.com

 

Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind

Susan Schneider

 

From driverless cars to neural netting, AI is infiltrating our lives at every level, raising questions of consciousness and selfhood that have resounding implications for the future of humanity. Susan Schneider examines these and other pressing philosophical questions. Interspersing provocative thought experiments – like shopping for an AI mind in the “Center for Mind Design” -- Schneider proposes concrete ways to test for machine consciousness, questions whether consciousness is an unavoidable byproduct of sophisticated intelligence, and considers the risks and promises of creating machine minds. 

 

Dr. Susan Schneider is the NASA/Blumberg Chair at NASA and the Library of Congress and the director of the AI, Mind and Society Group at the University of Connecticut. She writes about the fundamental nature of the self and mind, especially from the vantage point of issues in philosophy, artificial intelligence, cognitive science and astrobiology. Her work has been explored on television shows on PBS, The History Channel, Fox and the National Geographic Channel, and has been featured by The New York Times, Science, Nautilus, Smithsonian, Scientific American and more.

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control

Stuart Russell

In the popular imagination, superhuman artificial intelligence is an approaching tidal wave that threatens not just jobs and human relationships, but civilization itself. Conflict between humans and machines is seen as inevitable and its outcome all too predictable. Distinguished AI researcher Stuart Russell argues that this scenario can be avoided, but only if we rethink AI from the ground up. We can rebuild AI on a new foundation, according to which machines are designed to be inherently uncertain about the human preferences they are required to satisfy. Such machines would be humble, altruistic, and committed to pursue our objectives, not theirs. This new foundation would allow us to create machines that are provably deferential and provably beneficial.

Stuart Russell is a professor of Computer Science and holder of the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He has served as the Vice-Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Council on AI and Robotics and as an advisor to the United Nations on arms control. He is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the author (with Peter Norvig) of the definitive and universally acclaimed textbook on AI, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach.

 

 

Free to All