Artificial Intelligence and the Way Life Should Be: The Challenges of Making AI Systems in Maine Wiser, Not Just “Smarter”
February 10, 2024, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Our planet is being transformed by “smart” systems using artificial intelligence designed to achieve one or a few values ever more efficiently. To better take into account the host of values that make life in our communities just, convivial, ecologically sustainable, and spiritually nourishing, we need systems that are “wiser, not just smarter”. We need to change the conception of rationality at the core of mainstream economics, politics, technology and ethics.
In his book Smarter Planet, or Wiser Earth?, Cox provides an analysis of the challenges and systematic strategies to address them. It draws on the best of contemporary research on conflict resolution and peacemaking including Quaker, Gandhian, Indigenous, and other traditions to articulate methods of collaborative reasoning and ethical choice. It describes specific ways to use these methods to transform the ways we teach ethics and run our economy, politics, and technology. That includes redesigning the AI systems and practices that govern our world by shifting to new forms of programming that draw on collaborative dialogue instead of relying solely on monological forms of linear algorithmic inference. It offers paths to spirit-led, collaborative wisdom and partnerships with researchers and activists creating solutions to existential threats from ecological collapse, climate change, wars of mutually assured destruction, and out of control technology.
Gray Cox currently teaches at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor. Gray taught previously at Middle Tennessee State University and Earlham College before joining COA fulltime in 1994. He grew up on MDI and was a guinea pig student in COA’s first experimental classes in the summer of 1971.
This will be an after-hours program; library services will be unavailable.