AI through the looking glass:
Interdisciplinary insights into challenges and risks
Interdisciplinary insights into challenges and risks
Registration
Fill-in the following registration form to receive announcements and updates, including the details to follow the seminar remotely on Zoom.
Aims and scope
The idea of setting up this interdisciplinary seminar emerged from the observation that the current development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) goes far beyond technological innovation. AI is rapidly transforming scientific working methods, research processes, higher education, knowledge transfer and many other aspects of our society at a pace that requires continuous dialogue across disciplines. Many of the questions arising from these developments can be adequately addressed only through collaboration between mathematics, computer science, the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.
With this seminar series, we aim to create an international forum based in the Berlin-Brandenburg area that regularly brings together researchers from different disciplines and enables a scientifically grounded, interdisciplinary exchange on the latest developments and their long-term consequences.
Contact
ai.and.the.looking.glass (at) gmail.com
Forthcoming sessions
Wednesday, October 14th (Berlin)
4 pm - Opening brainstorming session: everyone is welcome to participate!
5 pm - Valeria de Paiva (Topos Institute Berkeley, per zoom)
Logic, AI, and the Mathematics We Want to Build
Frank Quinn described an invisible revolution in twentieth-century mathematics: a profound change in our understanding of proof and rigour, which gave rise to modern logic, math and, eventually, theoretical computer science. Today we are living through another transformation. Logic helped create computation, but the current revolution in artificial intelligence has come largely from statistics, neural networks, data and massive computational power. Now logic is needed again: AI systems can produce remarkably convincing mathematical arguments, but convincing is not the same as correct.
This makes formal mathematics newly important. The better machines become at generating mathematics, the more we need reliable ways of checking what they produce. But I do not want the consequence to be that mathematicians must learn to communicate like proof assistants. I will discuss attempts to combine the precision of formal mathematics with the flexibility and economy of ordinary mathematical language, using AI itself to help bridge the two.
Finally, the mathematics we are building is not only technical infrastructure. It depends on open publications, libraries and communities, and on decisions about whose work becomes visible and receives credit. Drawing on my experience with Women in Logic and Women in Formal Mathematics, I will argue that the challenge posed by AI is therefore not simply how machines will do mathematics, but what kind of mathematics—and what kind of mathematical community—we want to build.
Friday, October 23rd (Potsdam)
10 am - Opening brainstorming session: everyone is welcome to participate!
11 am - TBA
Topic: TBA
Venues
Berlin Technical University
Wednesdays 4 - 6 pm (every other week)
IMOs, Fasanenstr. 89, 10623 Berlin, IMoS, Room 0004
(entrance at Müller-Breslau-Straße 10)
and
Potsdam University, Golm Campus
Fridays 10 - 12 am (every other week)
Mathematics Institute, Building 9
Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 24-25
D-14476 Potsdam OT Golm