Distinguished Lecture: The Human Strategy

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Abstract:
How can we live in a world of AI, big data, social media echo chambers and cyberattacks? How can we create a cyberculture with a human feel, but yet is competitive with cultures where the machines run everything? The core of current AI is the idea of a credit assignment function, reinforcing connections between “neurons” that are helping. So, what would happen if the neurons were people? People have lots of capabilities; they know lots of things about the world; they can perceive things in a human way. What would happen if you had a network of people where you could reinforce connections between people that were helping and discourage the connections that weren’t? What concrete steps do we have to take in order to transform our current world into one that naturally becomes smarter and smarter, which can absorb AI without changing its human flavor, and which is robust to attacks of all sorts?

Bio:
MIT Professor Alex “Sandy” Pentland previously helped create and direct the MIT Media Lab, and is one of the most-cited computational scientists in the world. He is a founding member of advisory boards for Google, AT&T, Nissan, and the UN Secretary General, a serial entrepreneur who has co-founded more than a dozen companies. His most recent books are Honest Signals (MIT) and Social Physics (Penguin).