Dawn or Doom Conference, Purdue University, Nov 5 and 6, 2018

“Celebrating its fifth year, Dawn or Doom explores the effects of rapidly emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, by bringing together leading national experts and stars from Purdue’s large constellation of researchers to kick-start conversations about potential risks and rewards.

The conference on Purdue’s West Lafayette, Ind., campus Nov. 5 and 6, 2018, is free and open to the public and is designed for attendees to take in as many talks as fit their schedules. This year’s conference focuses on how emerging technologies promise to change our bodies and minds, our interactions with machines and the universe, and the central role of data in all of this.

Since it began in 2014, Dawn or Doom has annually brought together experts on topics ranging from surveillance drones and living on Mars to genetically modified foods and genetically personalized medicine. The two-day conference now attracts over 6,000 people who interact with speakers in weighing questions like: What’s the future of work if AIs and robots can do it all for us? Is the internet affecting my mental health? Who decides whether a development represents dawn or doom (or a bit of both)?”

https://www.purdue.edu/dawnordoom/

These two TED talks offer compelling and insightful perspectives on the inevitability and consequences of our creating a super-human, general-scope artificial intelligence:

An SPFE (senior premier field engineer) at Microsoft recommended to me the film Ex Machina. I told him I wasn’t interested because it looked like a sci-fi horror film. He assured me it was not, and that it was instead a deep, philosophical, epistemological, and ontological exploration of artificial intelligence and the Turing test. He was right.