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TEACH YOUR ROBOTS WELL: Will Self-taught Robots be the End of Us?

Friday, June 1, 2018
8:00 pm - 9:30 pm EST

“Success in creating effective A.I.,” said the late Stephen Hawking, “could be the biggest event in the history of our civilization. Or the worst. We just don’t know.” Elon Musk called A.I. “a fundamental risk to the existence of civilization.” Are we creating the instruments of our own destruction or exciting tools for our future survival? Once we teach a machine to learn on its own—as the programmers behind AlphaGo have done, to wondrous results—where do we draw moral and computational lines? Leading specialists in A.I., neuroscience, and philosophy will tackle the very questions that may define the future of humanity.

The Big Ideas Series is supported in part by the John Templeton Foundation. 

Moderator

Tim UrbanWriter

Tim Urban is the Writer, Illustrator, and Co-Founder of Wait But Why, a long-form, stick-figure-illustrated website with over 600,000 subscribers and a monthly average of one million visitors. He has produced dozens of viral articles on a wide range of topics, from artificial intelligence to social anxiety to humans becoming a multi-planetary species.

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Participants

Yann LeCunComputer Scientist, NYU, Meta
Turing Award

Yann LeCun is VP & Chief AI Scientist at Facebook and Silver Professor at NYU affiliated with the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences & the Center for Data Science. He …

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Susan SchneiderPhilosopher, Cognitive Scientist

Susan Schneider is the 2019 Distinguished Scholar at the Library of Congress and the Director of the AI, Mind and Society (AIMS) Group at the University of Connecticut. She writes about the fundamental nature of the self and mind.

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Max TegmarkPhysicist, AI researcher, Author

President of the Future of Life Institute, Max Tegmark advocates for positive use of technology. He is also a professor doing physics and AI research at MIT.

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Peter Ulric TseNeuroscientist

Peter Ulric Tse is interested in understanding, first, how matter can become conscious, and second, how conscious and unconscious mental events can be causal in a universe where so many believe a solely physical account of causation should be sufficient.

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