BCIG Bookclub: “Beyond AI: Creating the
Conscience of the Machine”
- view the seminar archive
"Taking us on an eloquent journey through an
astonishingly diverse intellectual terrain, J. Storrs
Hall's 'Beyond AI' articulates an optimistic view - in
both capability and impact –of the future of AI. This is
a must read for anyone interested in the future of the
human-machine civilization."
- Ray Kurzweil
Clinical
Center (Building 10) Medical Board Room (Room 2C116)
THE PROGRAM: Author J.Storrs Hall will be present at
this meeting. He will review the book and dialogue with
attendees about it. Then, most likely we will have
dinner with the author in a nearby downtown Bethesda
restaurant.
BOOK REVIEW: (By the author) I've been studying AI since
the 1970s. After working in the field for a quarter of a
century, I became interested in the question of whether,
if we really did manage to succeed, but built a machine
that only thought in a goal-directed, rational way,
wouldn't we have just succeeded in building a (possibly
superhuman) psychopath? -- and would this really be such
a smart thing to do? This book is the result of my
investigations. It is first and foremost an attempt to
give you, the reader, a solid foundation for
understanding AI in the first place -- how far it has
come, what it can do, how likely it is to produce the
kind of super-intelligent robot minds we might
reasonably worry about. Then I talk about what what we
actually know about human consciences and the brand-new
AI subfield of machine ethics. And finally I take my
best shot as predicting what AI will mean for the human
condition over the coming decades. In fact, as I did the
research and a lot of thinking in the course of writing
the book, I came away with a different understanding of
the question than I had started with, a somewhat more
optimistic one. I wanted to write a slightly more
technical book, and my editor at Prometheus wanted a
somewhat more popular book. The result is a book which
is accessible but challenging to the intelligent general
reader. It couldn't be aimed at experts -- there are no
experts in the field yet, really, and the book covers
too much ground, from cybernetics to moral philosophy.
http://www.mol-eng.com/
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5:30 pm- 7:30 pm November 1, 2007
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
J. Storrs Hall, Ph.D. (will be present at this meeting)
J. Storrs Hall received his
Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rutgers University in 1994. His thesis title is
“Associative Processing: Architectures, Algorithms, Applications” and Since 1998
he has been a research fellow at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing in
Palo Alto, California. He is also a co-founder of Nanorex, Inc. His impressive
list of publications and other significant accomplishments may be found at
http://www.imm.org/about/hall/
SUITABILITY:
Anyone interested in the subject matter of the book is most welcome to attend
this BCIG Book Club Event.
REGISTRATION:
As with most all BCIG events, registration is not required. Just show up happy.
NIH CONTACT:
Carl Leonard, 301-496-0191,
cleonard@lired.com
REFRESHMENTS:
Please bring refreshments if you wish. There is a cafeteria near our meeting
room. We may go out to dinner with the author in a nearby Bethesda restaurant
after the meeting.
BCIG WEB SITE:
www.nih-bcig.org
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