Humans steer the future not because we’re the strongest or the fastest but because we’re the smartest animal on this planet. However, there are no reasons to assume that evolutionary processes have reached the physical limit of intelligence with us. Quite to the contrary, we have already seen how intelligent machines outperform the best of our kind on an increasing number of tasks, ranging from chess to the quiz show Jeopardy. Will artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence in a broader range of intellectual tasks and control our destiny? Are we about to make our final invention? And what is to be done from an ethical perspective?
During this interdisciplinary weekend organised by two members of the Swiss Study Foundation, you will learn about optimal universal intelligence, biological and artificial learning, state and trends in artificial intelligence and a phenomenon called intelligence explosion. The Sunday will be dedicated to the future of evolution and some philosophical and ethical considerations. We will have guest presentations by Dr. Frederike Petzschner from the Translational Neuromodeling Unit at the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, PhD student Andreas Heinrich from the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Manno and Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel from the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland. (You can find an introduction to the topic at http://www.inside-it.ch/articles/38971.)
Language: The whole seminar will be in English.
Background: No prior knowledge of the topic is required.
Lecturers:
– Kaspar Etter, MSc ETH Zurich in Computer Science and young entrepreneur
– Adrian Hutter, PhD student in Quantum Computing at the University of Basel
Preparation: Participants will have to read a paper for the case study on Saturday.
Place: Solothurn Youth Hostel (http://www.youthhostel.ch/solothurn)
Number of Participants: 18
Application Deadline: April 13th 2015
