FRIEND or FOE: The AI Debate with Michael L. Littman, PhD

The uses and abuses of ChatGPT artificial intelligence language model have taken the collective imagination by storm. Apocalyptic predictions of the singularity, when technology becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, frighten us as we imagine a future where human intelligence is irrelevant. Prof. Michael Littman joins us to contextualize the advancement of artificial intelligence and debunk the paranoid rhetoric littering the public discourse.

Michael has made groundbreaking research contributions enabling machines to learn from their experiences, assess the environment, make decisions, and improve their actions over time in real-world applications. His later work expanded into multi-agent systems, investigating how several AI entities can learn to cooperate, compete, or coexist in shared environments. Picture a team of robots in a factory, each with different tasks. The challenge here isn't just for each robot to do its job effectively but also to collaborate with the others, avoid collisions, and adapt to changes in real time.

Emerging concepts of 'intelligence' in artificial intelligence aren't about building machines that can perform tasks faster and more accurately than humans; it is about building machines that can think, learn, and adapt - machines that aren't just tools but collaborative partners.

If we examine our resistance to this emerging technology, we might catch glimpses of our unconscious fear of regression and dependency. Observation suggests most people fall into one of two groups, those who idealize a world where they are free of demands and another where they are enslaved by superiors. When we realize the fear or fantasy of regression is not the likely outcome of artificial intelligence, we are free to imagine the innumerable creative applications of the new technology and the machines that use it.

MICHAEL L. LITTMAN, PhD

Michael L. Littman is University Professor of Computer Science at Brown University, where he studies machine learning and decision-making under uncertainty. He has earned multiple university-level awards for teaching and his research has been recognized with three best-paper awards and three influential paper awards. Littman is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery. He is currently serving as Division Director for Information and Intelligent Systems at the National Science Foundation. His book "Code to Joy: Why Everyone Should Learn a Little Programming" (MIT Press) will be released October 3rd 2023.

Michael's WEBSITE

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