Explaining AI: Exploring the future
Eric Leonardis explains the future of artificial intelligence and addresses the concern of AI in the job market. // Photo courtesy of Jacob Aurelus
Artificial intelligence is the technology of the future. It has already had a massive effect on many industries, and its impact and influence will only continue to grow as there are more opportunities for it to develop.
It is important for the public to understand how AI operates so we can create a future that has technological prowess and remains ethical in the process. That was the goal of Eric Leonardis’ talk, “Explaining AI,” on Tuesday, April 16, in partnership with the Hofstra Cultural Center and philosophy department. Leonardis is a postdoctoral fellow at Talmo Pereira and Tom Albright Labs and studies human and animal behavior using computational neuroscience.
The talk opened with the most prominent question on a lot of people’s minds when it comes to AI: will it become evil? Leonardis questioned that logic, positing that if AI was to grow to be this dangerous force, why were the world’s largest companies continuing their research into it? To Leonardis, it is nothing but late-stage capitalist fear-mongering.
Discussions about the ethics of AI were a major component of the talk. Much focus was placed on the impact that bias has on the results that an AI can give you, especially if the AI was trained on the entire internet, which can have major biases.
If people want AI tools to give them objective answers, Leonardis argued, they need to be extremely careful with the data that AI is trained on. According to Leonardis, such biases can lead to awful results like unfair criminal sentencing. This is why he urged that AI tools be only trained on curated data and not the whole internet. Leonardis said that “smaller datasets and smaller networks” are the way forward for artificial intelligence.
Leonardis also discussed many other issues that are connected to AI such as the clear errors that AI commonly makes, the fact that there is a lack of total transparency in how AI tools are made, the history of automation, the mathematical functions necessary to train these large language models and the neuroscience behind AI.
This talk intrigued many people from multiple disciplines and the Q&A session was full of engaged discussion on the topic from students, professors and other attendees.
Anthony Dardis, a professor of philosophy at Hofstra, gave an interesting perspective on the event.
“I particularly liked the interaction towards the end when a computer science professor and Leonardis went back and forth on the need for interdisciplinary engagement because this is a massive societal issue that requires everyone to work together,” Dardis said.
“Explaining AI” served as a catalyst for starting conversations and instilling deeper understanding across multiple perspectives. The event underscored the importance of exploring and collaborating with others in order to confront the opportunities and challenges ahead. If this can be done, society can expect a future where innovations are not only welcomed but guided by ethics and justice.
