Featuring Jaron Lanier, Prime Unifying Scientist, Microsoft

Large model AI can be reconceived as a social collaboration between the people who provided data to the model in the form of text, images, and other modalities. This is a figure/ground inversion of the usual conception of AI as being a participant or collaborator in its own right. Explanations of model results and behaviors would then center around the relative influence of specific inputs through a provenance calculation mechanism. This formulation suggests new and different strategies for long term economics in the context of high performance AI, as well as more concrete approaches to many safety, fairness, and alignment questions.

Speaker Bio: Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, composer, artist, and author. He currently serves as “Prime Unifying Scientist” for Microsoft. He has received many awards, including a lifetime career award from the IEEE and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, one of literature’s highest honors. In 2018, he was named one of the 25 most influential people in the previous 25 years of tech history by Wired Magazine. He's also been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine, top one hundred public intellectuals in the world by Foreign Policy Magazine, and top 50 World Thinkers by Prospect Magazine. In computer science he is probably best known for his work in Virtual Reality. He coined the term, had the first startup, sold the first hardware, and pioneered the major applications. His tech startups from the 1980s landed at Adobe, Google, Pfizer, and Oracle. He is also known as a critic of technology, through his books like Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts, and for TV appearances such as in “The Social Dilemma”. He is also active in cognitive science, theoretical physics, philosophy, and economics. ***Light refreshments will be served at 3:15 and Jaron's talk will begin at 3:30*** Zoom: bit.ly/Jaron-Zoom Dial-In Information Guests may also join the conversation by Zoom