Artificial Intelligence: Friend or Foe?
Monday, May 2, 2016 / 2:30 pm – 3:30 pm
Beverly Hills Ballroom
Moderator
Alexandra Suich, U.S. Technology Editor, the Economist
Speakers
Guruduth Banavar, Vice President and Chief Science Officer, Cognitive Computing, IBM
Michael Ferro, Founder, Chairman and CEO, Merrick Ventures
Stuart Russell, Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley; Vice Chair, World Economic Forum Council on AI and Robotics
David M. Siegel, Co-Chairman, Two Sigma
Shivon Zilis, Partner and Founding Member, Bloomberg Beta
It was fun to watch IBM’s Watson beat a human on “Jeopardy” in 2011, and we smiled when Apple’s Siri answered her first question. But as computers and machines become more powerful, faster and able to make decisions on their own, is this brave new world of artificial intelligence a triumph of human ingenuity or, as some fear, the beginning of the end of humankind? Some of the world’s most influential figures warn that artificial intelligence could advance to the point where we can no longer control it. They call for regulatory oversight, strict ethical guidelines and a ban on superintelligent computers. Others say such concerns are vastly overblown, that we are hundreds of years from having computers that are more intelligent than humans and that the benefits to society vastly outweigh the potential downsides. This session will explore the latest advances in AI and try to answer the question: beneficial or malevolent?
