LEWIS DARTNELL - Author of Origins: How the Earth Made Us & Being Human: How Our Biology Shaped World History

How have our psychology and cognitive biases altered the course of human history? What would you do if you had to rebuild our world from scratch?

Lewis Dartnell is an author, researcher, and holds the Professorship in Science Communication at the University of Westminster. He researches astrobiology and the search for microbial life on Mars. He also works as a scientific consultant for the media and has appeared in numerous TV documentaries and radio shows. Dr. Dartnell has won several awards for his science writing and outreach work. He has published five books, including The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch; Origins: How the Earth Made Us; and Being Human: How Our Biology Shaped World History.

"AI is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. It promises both enormous potential and capability from helping with medical diagnosis and catching cancer early or removing a lot of tedium and repetitive nature of many jobs. It can make a lot of great contributions. It's how we control that technology by making active decisions that can be the pathway to the future. There's been a lot of doomsday talk about artificial general intelligence and the Terminator-type outcome, and it's certainly not impossible, but I don't personally believe that is a probable outcome from where we are now.

I think one of the things that AI is very good at is churning through and processing vast amounts of data, assuming that you've got your machine learning system set up correctly and trained properly and you're using it in the way that it was intended to be used. Machine learning and AI techniques are incredibly powerful in pulling out the important information in a sea of data, but to convert that information into new understanding, that is the role of humans in that process. And it will remain the role of humans in understanding what is important and how to implement that information once you've fished out this sea of data."

http://www.lewisdartnell.com
http://lewisdartnell.com/en-gb/2013/11/the-knowledge-how-to-rebuild-our-world-from-scratch
www.penguin.co.uk/books/433955/origins-by-lewis-dartnell/9781784705435
www.penguin.co.uk/books/442759/being-human-by-dartnell-lewis/9781847926708

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