Professor Wilks will discuss the argument that ‘superintelligent’ AI may turn against us, as Hawking and Bostrom have warned. It will be argued that these worries misrepresent the achievements and potential of AI, and that the ethical dilemmas of AI will be deeper and more challenging than just managing idleness due to automation, or how to blame an automated car in a crash. They will include how to treat the artificial Companions created to curate our own lifetimes of information.
Yorick Wilks is Visiting Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Gresham College. He is also Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Sheffield, a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, and a Senior Scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. Professor Wilks is especially interested in the fields of artificial intelligence and the computer processing of language, knowledge and belief. His current research focuses on the possibility of software agents having identifiable personalities.
Professor Wilks's lecture series are as follows:
2019/20 The State of Artificial Intelligence: War, Ethics and Religion
2018/19 The State of Artificial Intelligence: Hype vs Progress
All lectures by the Visiting Professor of Artificial Intelligence can be accessed here.
Current Visiting Professor of Information Technology
