Distinguished academic and bestselling author Frank Pasquale pays a virtual visit to Cambridge to share his thoughts on trust in the public sphere in an era of AI-generated language. His talk will cover issues such as Google Duplex and political bots, and also address the unease infusing the academic disciplines of Law and Philosophy, now that the latest incarnations of AI (such as GPT-3 by OpenAI) are exhibiting genuinely human-equivalent speech performance characteristics. How close are we to a human-like, highly sophisticated artificial general intelligence (AGI)?
Frank Pasquale is currently Professor of Law at the Brooklyn Law School. He is a noted expert on the law of artificial intelligence, algorithms, and machine learning. He is an internationally regarded scholar, whose work focuses on how information is used across a number of areas, including health law, commerce, and tech. His wide-ranging expertise encompasses the study of the rapidity of technological advances and the unintended consequences of the interaction of privacy law, intellectual property, and antitrust laws, as well as the power of private sector intermediaries to influence healthcare and education finance policy.
He is the author of The Black Box Society (Harvard University Press, 2015), which develops a social theory of reputation, search, and finance. The book offered critical legal commentary on algorithmic approaches to marketing, and recommended law and policy to make search engines and social networks more accountable.
Professor Pasquale's latest publication New Law of Robotics - Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI, due to be published in the UK this autumn, argues forcefully for democratic oversight of technological development.
Quite how AI will shape our working lives, our civic existence, our healthcare, will depend on a host of decisions about how to develop AI - decisions that should not be left to the marketplace of technology innovation alone. Frank proposes ways to democratise that decision making, rather than allow it to be centralised in the hands of unaccountable corporations.
The online event is free, but advance registration is required. Please register your interest on Zoom to reserve your place - numbers are limited to allow for moderated Q&A after the talk.
