ETH Global Lecture Series: As If Human
23 Oct 2024 - AI's history shows cycles of enthusiasm and disillusionment regarding its impact. Concerns are rising about regulating and aligning AI systems with human values and ethics. This Global Lecture will explore AI's history, current advancements, and the challenges and opportunities presented by today's and future AI systems.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has a decades-long history that exhibits alternating enthusiasm and disillusionment for the field’s scientific insights, technical accomplishments, and socioeconomic impact. Recent achievements and deployments have seen renewed claims for the transformative and disruptive effects of AI. However, there is growing concern about how we regulate and govern AI systems, and how we ensure that such systems align with human values and ethics, how we live alongside these new products of our technical ingenuity.
This Global Lecture will review the history and current state of the art in AI, and consider how we address the challenges and opportunities that current and imminent AI systems present.
As If Human: Living in the Age of Intelligent Machines with Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt FRS FREng FBCS
Wednesday, 23 October 2024
13.00 - 14.00 CET
HG F30 Audimax, door opens at 12.30
This lecture is in English. A reception will take place after the lecture
Registration is required external page here
Speakers
- external page Sir Nigel Shadbolt, leading researcher in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Professorial Research Fellow in Computer Science at the University of Oxford
- Margarita Boenig-Liptsin, Professor for Ethics, Technology and Society in the Department of Humanities, and Social and Political Sciences at ETH Zürich (moderation)
Programme
- Welcome/Introduction by Margarita Boenig-Liptsin
- Presentation by Sir Nigel Shadbolt
- Q&A with the audience
Nigel Shadbolt
Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt is a leading researcher in Artificial Intelligence (AI). He is Principal of Jesus College Oxford and a Professor of Computing Science at the University of Oxford. He is chairman of the Open Data Institute which he co-founded with Sir Tim Berners-Lee. In 2009 he was appointed Information Advisor by the UK Prime Minister and, working with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, oversaw Open Data releases across the public sector. He was knighted in 2013 for ‘services to science and engineering’.
Sir Nigel has been working in AI for over four decades, having obtained his PhD from the University of Edinburgh’s Department of Artificial Intelligence in 1984. His first tenured faculty position was in the Department of Psychology at the University of Nottingham where he established and led its first AI group.
He moved to Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science in 2000. At Southampton he researched the next generation of the World Wide Web and was the first Head of the Web and Internet Science Group. At Oxford he has focused his research on human centred AI in a wide range of applications. Most recently he was asked to lead the setting up of the Oxford Institute of Ethics in AI. He spent the first part of 2024 as the Donald Gordon Fellow at STIAS (Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies).
With over 500 publications, he has researched and published on topics ranging from cognitive psychology to computational neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence to the Semantic Web. In 2018 he published The Digital Ape: how to live (in peace) with smart machines, described as a ‘landmark book’. May 2024 saw the publication of his latest book As If Human: Ethics and Artificial Intelligence by Yale University Press.
He is a Fellow of The Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, and the British Computer Society.
Margarita Boenig-Liptsin
Margarita Boenig-Liptsin is an Assistant Professor for Ethics, Technology and Society in D-GESS. She is trained in the field of Science, Technology and Society ("STS" for short) from the Harvard STS Program and holds a PhD in History of Science (Harvard University) and in Philosophy (Université Paris-Sorbonne).
Her research examines transformations to human identity and citizenship in relation to information technologies across time and cultures. She also studies the meaning, practices, and institutions of ethics and democratic governance in contemporary technological societies. She has published on the ethics of innovation projects in cities, on converging technologies and visions of the good, and articulated novel ethical frameworks and interventions into responsible technical practice. A recurrent theme in her work is to ask how interpretive social science insights and relational critical theory can be used to re-think projects of ethics in technological societies.