Event Description
AI is impossible to avoid online. If you have a smartphone, you have AI in your pocket. And it has already changed everything from how doctors diagnose disease to how you interact with friends or read the news. But in Rule of the Robots, Martin Ford argues that the true revolution is yet to come.
In this sequel to his prescient New York Times bestseller Rise of the Robots, Ford presents us with a striking vision of the very near future. He argues that AI is a uniquely powerful technology that is altering every dimension of human life, often for the better. For example, advanced science is being done by machines, solving devilish problems in molecular biology that humans could not, and AI can help us fight climate change or the next pandemic. It also has a capacity for profound harm. Deep fakes – AI-generated audio or video of events that never happened – are poised to cause havoc throughout society. AI empowers authoritarian regimes like China with unprecedented mechanisms for social control. And AI can be deeply biased, learning bigoted attitudes from us and perpetuating them.
In short, this is not a technology to simply embrace, or let others worry about. The machines are coming, and each of us needs to know what that means if we are to thrive in the twenty-first century. Rule of the Robots is the essential guide to all of it: both AI and the future of our economy, our politics, our lives.
Speaker Biography
Martin Ford is a futurist and the author of four books: Rule of the Robots, Rise of the Robots, winner of the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award 2015, Architects of Intelligence, and The Lights in the Tunnel. He is also the founder of a Silicon Valley-based software development firm.
This event is part of a year-long celebration marking sixty years of research into computer science and AI at the University of Edinburgh. Starting in 1963 with a small group of machine intelligence pioneers, and computer science innovators, the University has 60 years of achievements to celebrate during 2023, and its leadership in future technologies to share. More information about the celebration: edin.ac/60-years-computer-science-ai