Virtual Futures presents a panel on artificial intelligence, intelligence augmentation and mind clones at IBM Watson, New York.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already part of our daily lives. Humans increasingly delegate and outsource their brains to artificial agents that are able to make decisions and perform routine tasks on their behalf. Some of the most ubiquitous agents perform medical diagnostics, stock market trades, and make decisions as to our eligibility for car insurance or bank loans. Indeed, IBM’s Watson is such a cognitive computing platform that helps humans inform their decision-making process.
 
The pervasive nature in which AI has entered the public consciousness has driven an increasing fascination with the semi-autonomous, semi-intelligent software agents that will come to form the next wave of computing, inform the future of business, and maybe the next incarnation of human experience.
 
This panel has been curated to address an urgent need to explore some of the latest perspectives on the relationship(s) between humans and non-human machine agents. The panel will explore if we might ever create machines that match, or even surpass, distinctive traits and achievements that make us human. It will also address the need to understand where a fascination with machines that exhibit human-like capabilities and intelligences originates.
 
Most importantly this panel will address the fundamental differences between artificial intelligence, cognitive computing, software agents and machine intelligences – terms that are often used interchangeably.

It will be increasingly important to make these distinctions if we are to better navigate a world where non-human/ non-biological systems act intelligently and begin to exhibit life-like behaviours.

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Panelists

Martine Rothblatt, CEO of United Theraputics, Author of "Virtually Human: The Promise - and the Peril - of Digital Immortality

Prof. Steve Fuller, Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick, founder of Social Epistemology

Dr. Dan O'Hara, Senior Lecturer at New College of the Humanities

Michael Karasick, Vice President Innovations, IBM Watson Group

Moderated by:

Douglas Rushkoff, Media Theorist

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Find out more: http://virtualfutures.co.uk

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Virtually Human | Virtual Futures Salon

Virtual Futures presents Prof. Steve Fuller to dicuss how the post-truth world-view is deeply rooted in the history and philosophy of religion, politics and science.

‘Post-truth’ was Oxford Dictionaries 2016 word of the year. While the term was coined by its disparagers in the light of the Brexit and US presidential campaigns, the roots of post-truth lie deep in the history of Western social and political theory. Post-Truth reaches back to Plato, ranging across theology and philosophy, to focus on the Machiavellian tradition in classical sociology, as exemplified by Vilfredo Pareto, who offered the original modern account of post-truth in terms of the ‘circulation of elites’.

The defining feature of ‘post-truth’ is a strong distinction between appearance and reality which is never quite resolved and so the strongest appearance ends up passing for reality. The only question is whether more is gained by rapid changes in appearance or by stabilizing one such appearance. Post-Truth plays out what this means for both politics and science.

Prof. Steve Fuller is the Auguste Comte Professor of Social Epistemology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, UK. Originally trained in history and philosophy of science, Fuller pioneered the field of ‘social epistemology’ in a quarterly journal that he founded in 1987 as well as in more than twenty books. His most recent books are Knowledge: The Philosophical Quest in History (2015) and The Academic Caesar (2016).

In conversation with Luke Robert Mason, Director of Virtual Futures.

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Find out more about Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game: http://post-truth.anthempress.com

Prof. Steve Fuller: http://twitter.com/ProfSteveFuller

Luke Robert Mason: http://twitter.com/lukerobertmason

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Follow the conversation on Twitter using #VFSalon

Support Virtual Futures on Patreon: http://patreon.com/virtualfutures

Find out more: http://virtualfutures.co.uk

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Post-Truth - with Prof. Steve Fuller | Virtual Futures Salon

Conference & Salon Events on the Convergence of Art, Culture, Philosophy, Science and Technology. Originally based at the University of Warwick (1994, 1995, 1996, 2011).

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