The hype around artificial intelligence has now reached monumental proportions. Worries about killer robots or robots taking our jobs have reached a fever pitch within governments, corporations, and universities.
In this talk, Dr Stevens will draw on the history of AI to argue that the hype may be misleading us in critical ways. AI’s history consists of over-promising and under-delivering. Why should this time be any different? Both the doomsday scenarios spun by some and the unbounded optimism pitched by others are overblown. In fact, there are good reasons to suspect that artificial intelligence — at least in the way it is most often portrayed — is very unlikely to emerge. However, the focus on existential threats and imaginary problems distracts us from focusing on both the benefits and the immediate problems created by the computer and data systems that currently dominate our lives.
MEET THE SPEAKER
Associate Professor of History, School of Humanities, Nanyang Technological University (NTU)
 | Dr Hallam Stevens is an associate professor of history in the School of Humanities at NTU. His work focuses on the history of science and technology and attempts to understand how information technologies have transformed the life sciences and our understanding of “life” in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He is the author of Life out of Sequence: A Data-Driven History of Bioinformatics (2013), Biotechnology and Society: An Introduction (2016), and the co-editor of Postgenomics: Perspectives on Biology After the Genome (2015). |
This event is presented by The HEAD Foundation, a Singapore-based think tank devoted to research and policy influence in education and leadership, for development in Asia.
Admission is free.
Disclaimer: The views expressed by the speaker in this talk are their own and do not represent the opinions of The HEAD Foundation.
