AI As Your Overlord: Assimilation, Acceptance or Resistance?

“I apologize for being unable to satisfy a lot of people’s expectations . . . I kind of felt powerless” so said Lee Sedol, Grand Master, on losing to DeepMind’s Alpha Go.  

We might not all be Grand Masters of an ancient game, but many are beginning to feel what Sedol did: diminished, defeated, out-witted and out-smarted by AI. In this lecture series, we will unpick this horror-story like narrative that has captured the popular imagination: AI as our Overlord. In the first half, we consider how we are already becoming assimilated or domesticated by advances in AI. However, half-way through, we will remind ourselves of who we are and turn to considering how AI can be designed, deployed and utilised for human flourishing.

Our journey, then, over the series, is one that moves us from a future of human redundancy and hopelessness to hopeful empowerment. The lectures will mix findings from IT and computer science (especially those related to human-computer interaction and responsible AI) along with those from psychology, sociology and history to provoke and engage audiences with a wide variety of interests.