Institute for Ethics in AI Annual Lecture
Event Overview
The Digital Hub is delighted to host the fourth AI Annual Lecture, which this year will be given by Professor Jessica Riskin, Frances and Charles Field Professor of History & Director of Graduate Teaching, Stanford University. Jessica will be discussing The Onion Axiom: A History of the Outside-In Approach to Artificial (and Natural) Intelligence.
Ever since the founding moments of artificial intelligence in the mid-twentieth century, the principal researchers and writers on the subject – from Alan Turing, and Norbert Weiner to Rodney Brooks, Daniel Dennett, and many others – have adopted the behaviourist assumption that intelligence is nothing more than its appearance. That if you could peel away all the layers of the onion, at the core you would find nothing but emptiness: there’s no one in there. This lecture will explore the implications of the onion axiom for the history of AI and consider how this history might inform our efforts to grapple with the runaway technology today.
Full details are on the Institute’s website here.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Jessica Riskin is Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University where she teaches modern European history and the history of science. Her work examines the changing nature of scientific explanation, the relations of science, culture and politics, and the history of theories of life and mind. Her books include The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick (2016), which was awarded the 2021 Patrick Suppes Prize in the History of Science from the American Philosophical Society, and Science in the Age of Sensibility (2002), which received the American Historical Association’s J. Russell Major prize for best book in French history. She is a regular contributor to various publications including Aeon, the Los Angeles Review of Books and the New York Review of Books.
