About this event
Given the enormous advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), many believe humanity is on the threshold of the most profound technological revolution it has ever witnessed. AI already affects our everyday lives, and our hopes and anxieties around AI run high. Some predict that further development of AI will put us on a path to human extinction while others believe it will usher in a new era of compassion, non-violence, and prosperity.
Against a background of unrelenting cultural and geopolitical tensions, looming planetary catastrophes, and big challenges in global health, justice, and democracy, will AI turn out to be yet another existential risk? Or will it help us address the major challenges of our times?
In this Futures Conversations event, we bring together leading experts from the worlds of science, politics, and civil society to debate what our AI futures may bring, and to develop ideas for what is needed to advance our collective ability to put AI to the best possible use. The conversation will build on a series of workshops where different visions of our AI future were explored, and which had a specific emphasis on hearing the voices of people and communities that are traditionally underrepresented in these debates.
Against the ideas developed in these workshops, we will discuss questions such as, who will determine our AI future, how AI and humanity can evolve alongside each other, what being human in an AI world will mean, and how AI-driven economies and societies will work. Rather than providing principles for what AI itself “should be like”, we aim to evolve into what we desire an “AI-ready” society could look like, and into new ideas for how we might build this future.
Speaker biographies
Petra Molnar, Associate Director of the Refugee Law Lab ( York University) and head of the Migration and Technology Monitor, a multilingual archive of work interrogating technological experiments on people crossing borders, funded by the Open Society Foundations.
Professor Kate Crawford, Research Professor (USC Annenberg, Los Angeles), Senior Principal Researcher (Microsoft Research Lab, NYC), Honorary Professor (University of Sydney), and inaugural Visiting Chair for AI and Justice (École Normale Supérieure, Paris).
Stuart Russell, Professor of Computer Science, holder of the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering, and Director of the Center for Human-Compatible AI and the Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public (Universiry of California, Berkeley).
Pascale Fung, Chair Professor at the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering (The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST)).
William Isaac, Staff Research Scientist (DeepMind), Advisory Board Member (Human Rights Data Analysis Group), and Research Affiliate (Oxford University Centre for the Governance of AI)
Shannon Vallor, Baillie Gifford Professor in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence & Director of the Centre for Technomoral Futures (University of Edinburgh).
Michael Rovatsos (Chair), Professor of Artificial Intelligence (University of Edinburgh), and head of the Bayes Centre, the University’s Data Science and AI innovation hub.
Please note this is a hybrid event. Streaming will be live captioned.