Dear all, We're pleased to announce the second in the Centre for The Study of Existential Risk's monthly seminar series: Professor Murray Shanahan (Imperial) on 'Minds Like Ours: An Approach to Artificial Intelligence Risk <http://cser.org/event/cser-seminar-murray-shanahan-on-artificial-intelligence/>'. Abstarct below.
The seminar will take place 16:00 – 17:30, Friday 20th February in Room SG1, Alison Richard Building, Sidgwick Site. The event is free, open to all and will be followed by a drinks reception. Professor Shanahan is professor of Cognitive Robotics at Imperial College London and was on the Scientific Organising Committee of the recent Chatham House Rule conference on the Future of Artificial Intelligence in Puerto Rico. The conference was co-organised by CSER and led to an open letter promoting "robust and beneficial development of AI" <http://futureoflife.org/misc/open_letter>, signed by leaders in AI worldwide. His latest book ‘The Technological Singularity’ is forthcoming with MIT Press and the current blockbuster movie 'Ex Machina' owes some credit to Professor Shanahan as scientific advisor. Abstract: *Writers who speculate about the future of artificial intelligence (AI) and its attendant risks often caution against anthropomorphism, the tendency to ascribe human-like characteristics to something non human. An AI that is engineered from first principles will attain its goals in ways that would be hard to predict, and therefore hard to control, especially if it is able to modify and improve on its own design. However, this is not the only route to human-level AI. An alternative is to deliberately set out to make the AI not only human-level but also human-like. The most obvious way to do this is to base the architecture of the AI on that of the human brain. But this path has its own difficulties, many pertaining to the issue of consciousness. Do we really want to create an artefact that is not only capable of empathy, but also capable of suffering?* We look forward to seeing many of you on Friday 20th! -- Nicholas Robinson Seminar Series Administrator Centre for the Study of Existential Risk University of Cambridge http://cser.org _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
