Virtually Human | Virtual Futures Salon
Channel: Virtual Futures
Date: 2017-12-31

Virtual Futures presents a panel on artificial intelligence, intelligence augmentation and mind clones at IBM Watson, New York.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already part of our daily lives. Humans increasingly delegate and outsource their brains to artificial agents that are able to make decisions and perform routine tasks on their behalf. Some of the most ubiquitous agents perform medical diagnostics, stock market trades, and make decisions as to our eligibility for car insurance or bank loans. Indeed, IBM’s Watson is such a cognitive computing platform that helps humans inform their decision-making process.
 
The pervasive nature in which AI has entered the public consciousness has driven an increasing fascination with the semi-autonomous, semi-intelligent software agents that will come to form the next wave of computing, inform the future of business, and maybe the next incarnation of human experience.
 
This panel has been curated to address an urgent need to explore some of the latest perspectives on the relationship(s) between humans and non-human machine agents. The panel will explore if we might ever create machines that match, or even surpass, distinctive traits and achievements that make us human. It will also address the need to understand where a fascination with machines that exhibit human-like capabilities and intelligences originates.
 
Most importantly this panel will address the fundamental differences between artificial intelligence, cognitive computing, software agents and machine intelligences – terms that are often used interchangeably.

It will be increasingly important to make these distinctions if we are to better navigate a world where non-human/ non-biological systems act intelligently and begin to exhibit life-like behaviours.

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Panelists

Martine Rothblatt, CEO of United Theraputics, Author of "Virtually Human: The Promise - and the Peril - of Digital Immortality

Prof. Steve Fuller, Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick, founder of Social Epistemology

Dr. Dan O'Hara, Senior Lecturer at New College of the Humanities

Michael Karasick, Vice President Innovations, IBM Watson Group

Moderated by:

Douglas Rushkoff, Media Theorist

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Find out more: http://virtualfutures.co.uk

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Credits

Produced by Virtual Futures
Camera by Crumlic Media Inc.
Sound by Crumlic Media Inc.
Edited by Luke Robert Mason
Edited by Proud Business Productions
Thanks to Rahul Akolkar
Thanks to Chick Foxgrover
Thanks to Carla Gannis
Thanks to Peter Patchen
Thanks to Pam Workman

Hosted at IBM Watson, New York: http://ibm.com/watson/

Supported by GREY, New York: http://grey.com

Recorded on 11 August 2015

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