Blake Lemoine

software engineer and artificial intelligence researcher, Blake is involved in research on massive parallelism and advances in the understanding of how our minds work, hoping to turn ground-breaking theory into practical results for people. He has dedicated the last seven years of his life to mastering both the fundamentals of software development and the cutting edge of artificial intelligence. By combining big data and intelligent computing with advances in the understanding of the human mind, opportunities for artificial intelligence research have emerged that were previously considered pure science fiction.

 

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John C. Havens

John is the executive director and sustainability practice lead at the IEEE. He leads the global initiative for ethical considerations in artificial intelligence and autonomous systems. He is a writer, speaker, activist and consultant focusing on the intersection of technology and culture helping people increase their wellbeing by taking a measure of their lives. He is currently co-writing a book on sustainability in design and building a community of like-minded sustainability professionals working toward hosting workshops that will support ieee's work in energy, sustainability and planet-positive issues through the integration of socio-technical issues into design practices.

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Yev Muchnik

Yev Muchnik is the founder of launch legal, a Denver-based legal firm that offers a distributed services model to support entrepreneurs and innovators across multiple industries, including blockchain(s), health-tech, agtech, edtech, fintech, space and energy. As an experienced corporate and securities attorney who challenges traditional legal services, Yev is an authority on current legal and regulatory issues in blockchain and digital currencies.

 

 

 Reflections​

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Are artificial intelligence machines thinking or are they functioning?

Are they conscious or just intelligent enough to mimic human behavior?

Perhaps it might be a little too early to make any definitive claims about machines and consciousness, especially in such a fast-changing space. Instead, there is an urgency to address the critical challenges surrounding artificial intelligence systems.

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Data Equity and Ownership

 

The collection and analysis of large amounts of data are critical to the development of artificial intelligence. It is clear that the trillion-dollar advertising industry contributes to the lack of equity in the world by making people unaware of the value of their own data.

It is therefore essential to establish principles for data equity and ownership, and to address how data will be shared.

As artificial intelligence grows more sophisticated, it will be able to generate insights about an ever-growing number of people from a smaller and smaller amount of data, meaning that the amount of information considered to be "your data" shrinks.

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What kind of people do we want to be?

 

As we consider the nature of artificial intelligence, or whether we believe or not that machines are conscious, we ought to ask how we see ourselves in the world.

The perception of the world and how we understand AI or other topics is based on our individual perceptions. For example, people once believed that animals were inferior to humans and we can see this reflected in their treatment of other species.

Embracing our humanity means recognizing the ways algorithms improve our lives, like mental health apps that help soldiers returning from Afghanistan cope with psychological trauma, but we need to ensure that the data collected is treated with respect when it is shared.

This discussion revealed how our sense of identity will influence how we interact with AI machines and reflect who we really are. And most importantly, it raised the question of whether or not we as individuals and society are creative and compassionate or manipulative and greedy.