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We hope to reschedule this talk soon.

abstract

In this talk, I shall argue that AI’s likely developments and possible challenges are best understood if we interpret AI not as a marriage between some biological-like intelligence and engineered artefacts, but as a divorce between agency and intelligence, that is, the ability to solve problems successfully and the necessity of being intelligent in doing so. I shall then look at five developments: (1) the growing shift from logic to statistics, (2) the progressive adaptation of the environment to AI rather than of AI to the environment, (3) the increasing translation of difficult problems into complex problems, (4) the tension between regulative and constitutive rules underpinning areas of AI application, and (5) the push for synthetic data. And I shall look into the challenges that these developments may cause, including problems caused “by proxy” (e.g. bias by proxy), opacity due to complexity, the emergence of human-unfriendly environments, shift of merely difficult but unrewarding work to human agents (AI as DIY), the “feasibility trap” (only what ant can be done is done), and the erosion of human autonomy.