With Christian Pederson
Track: AI Pedagogy Track
In his book Deep Utopia, Nick Bostrom considers the hypothetical scenario in which we are wildly successful in our development of AI, creating AI capable of doing everything that needs to be done (an AI-driven utopia), and he explores the implications of this scenario for our ability to live good lives. The basis of the potential problem is that having a sense of purpose and meaning in our lives is a vital part of living a good life, but this sense of purpose and meaning would be imperiled if AI performed all the tasks that are often associated with purpose and meaning in our lives currently. We are still a long way from this scenario now, but we are at a point in the development of AI where it is possible to offload a fair amount of our intellectual activity to AI. AI can not only handle mundane tasks like writing memos and emails, giving summaries of articles, or writing simple computer programs, but it can also create pictures, music, poetry, and literature. Narrowing this down to the context of the university, in this talk, he will consider where and how we might want to draw a line between academic intellectual activity that can be offloaded to AI and that which cannot.