Dr Melanie Mitchell of Portland State University and Santa Fe Institute

Artificial intelligence has been described as “the new electricity”, poised to revolutionize human life and benefit society as much or more than electricity did 100 years ago.  AI has also been described as “our biggest existential threat”, a technology that could “spell the end of the human race”.  Should we welcome intelligent machines or fear them? Or perhaps question whether they are actually intelligent at all?  In this talk, AI researcher and award-winning author Melanie Mitchell describes the current state of artificial intelligence, highlighting the field's recent stunning achievements as well as its surprising failures.  Mitchell considers the ethical issues surrounding the increasing deployment of AI systems in all aspects of our society, and closely examines the prospects for imbuing computers with humanlike qualities.

Biography:

Melanie Mitchell is the Davis Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and Professor of Computer Science at Portland State University.  She is widely known for her research and teaching in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and complex systems, and is the author of numerous scholarly papers and several books in these fields.  Her general-audience book, Complexity: A Guided Tour, won the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award and was named by Amazon.com as one of the ten best science books of 2009.  Her newest book, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, was recently published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.