Filmed at the Battle of Ideas festival 2023, this amazing panel explains with great clarity the limits of AI.
The computing pioneer Alan Turing predicted that, by the twenty-first century, ‘one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted’. If anything, his prediction now seems rather conservative. One tech entrepreneur – who has been appointed by the UK government to chair the Frontier AI Taskforce, a body established to ‘develop the safe and reliable use’ of AI – has described the AI of the future as potentially not just human-like but God-like (with a capital ‘G’) and ‘capable of infinite self-improvement’.
Is ‘infinite self-improvement’ a genuine possibility with AI, or might a more thorough assessment reveal some fundamental limits? If we delve into the rich history of computing, going all the way back to the nineteenth century, could we find the key to a more rational understanding of today’s fast-evolving technology?
The speakers are:
Dr Stuart Derbyshire - associate professor in psychology, National University of Singapore and the Clinical Imaging Research Centre
Professor Anders C Hansen - professor of mathematics, University of Cambridge; author, Compressive Imaging: structure, sampling, learning
Timandra Harkness - journalist, writer and broadcaster; presenter, Radio 4's FutureProofing and How to Disagree; author, Big Data: does size matter?
Andrew Orlowski - writer and critic; business columnist, Daily Telegraph
Dr Kathleen Stock - columnist, UnHerd; co-director, The Lesbian Project; author, Material Girls: why reality matters for feminism
The chair is: Sandy Starr - deputy director, Progress Educational Trust; author, AI: Separating Man from Machine

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