Artificial Intelligence: A technology to fear or welcome? Carl Benedikt Frey, Colin Paterson and Michael Wooldridge
Event details
Throughout history, people have feared new technology. Has such concern been justified in the past, and should we be worried about the technologies emerging from this ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’?
As part of our special Festival Focus Day on Artificial Intelligence, our expert speakers, including Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Wooldridge of the University of Oxford, discuss whether we should be worried about what the future may hold.
Brought to you in collaboration with the Assuring Autonomy International Programme, which is supported by the Lloyd’s Register Foundation and the University of York.
Travelling to the event
Public transport is the easiest way to travel to the University of York campus with frequent bus services from the city centre. If travelling by car to Campus East (Piazza Building and the Ron Cooke Hub), please use the Field Lane and Kimberlow Lane car parks. Maps and directions are available at york.ac.uk/maps.
About the speakers
Dr Carl Benedikt Frey is Oxford Martin Citi Fellow at Oxford University where he directs the programme on Technology and Employment at the Oxford Martin School. He is author of The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation. He has written extensively on topics including the economics of artificial intelligence, the future of work, and urban development. Over the course of his career, he has served as an advisor and consultant to international organisations, think tanks, government and business, including the OECD, the European Commission, the United Nations, and several Fortune 500 companies. His work has been widely cited by the BBC, CNN, The Economist, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, New York Times, Time Magazine, and many others. Carl Benedikt is also Economics Associate of Nuffield College and Senior Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, both University of Oxford. He remains a Senior Fellow of the Department of Economic History at Lund University.
Dr Colin Paterson is a Research Associate in the Assuring Autonomy International Programme where his research considers techniques for the verification of artificial intelligence. Having completed a PhD in control systems engineering in collaboration with Jaguar Cars, Colin moved into industry where he designed a number of bespoke web-based software solutions as well as a product suite for local government focused on governance, risk and compliance. Colin returned to academia in 2014 as a member of the Enterprise Systems group working on the formal verification of operational processes using observation data to enhance the modelling of such processes and the accuracy of verification techniques.
Professor Michael Wooldridge is a Professor of Computer Science and Head of Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford. He has been an AI researcher for more than 25 years, and has published more than 350 scientific articles on the subject. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Association for the Advancement of AI (AAAI), and the European Association for AI (EurAI). From 2014-16, he was President of the European Association for AI, and from 2015-17 he was President of the International Joint Conference on AI (IJCAI). He is the author of two popular science introductions to AI: the Ladybird Expert Guide to AI (Penguin, 2018), and the Road to Conscious Machines (Pelican, in press).
Assuring Autonomy International Programme
The Assuring Autonomy International Programme is a £12 million initiative funded by Lloyd’s Register Foundation and the University of York to spearhead research, training and standards in the safety of robotics and autonomous systems (RAS). Our vision is to further enable the widespread and beneficial uptake of RAS by overcoming the obstacles to achieving regulatory and public acceptance.
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