The Conversation Series : The Machines Are Coming, Should We Run For The Hills? Is Artificial Intelligence A Friend Or Foe?

The transformative power of artificial intelligence has changed everything. Driven by ai-based algorithms, gafa rules the world. A retailer knows more about what we want than we do; a social media platform creates echo chambers and influences world politics; a search engine reads our mind. This has changed how we connect, learn, work, shop, and live.

How do we celebrate and enhance the upsides of ai – to transform industries from retail to banking to stock markets to healthcare delivery to manufacturing to education? And how do we mitigate the downsides – issues of privacy and ethical use of data? The manipulative intents of some social media platforms? Can we trust the machines’? Is the predictive power of machines too strong? Is it time for social media platforms to be declared a public good?

Our speaker, a leading researcher on artificial intelligence, and a data scientist, will address these questions and more: how do these technologies impact our work, health, emotional well-being, government, democracy, and freedom? How do we get the best out of ai, while circumventing the pitfalls? How do we make artificial intelligence complement and augment human intelligence, not replace it?