AI is here. How can we help all the humans?

When

November 18, 2024 | 3:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Reception at 3 p.m. in the first floor lobby of University Hall

Where

University Hall 1005

Speaker

Po-Shen Loh, Mathematics Professor, Carnegie Mellon University

Abstract

Mathematics Department Special Presentation — All UAB students, faculty and guests are invited.

Researchers and companies are racing to be the first to create Artificial General Intelligence, which explicitly intends to broadly surpass human intelligence. Every few months, we see new reports of AI being able to perform more and more sophisticated tasks, even reaching the breakthrough of solving International Math Olympiad problems.

What then, will become of humans? It is now urgent to rapidly uplift human intelligence, as well as to unite humanity in a collaborative spirit, for the survival of the human race.

The speaker brings a unique background that bridges all of these worlds. He is on a mission to build a more thoughtful human world. He served as the national coach of the USA International Math Olympiad team for a decade, but also regularly interacts with students from underprivileged schools with low exam scores. He is also a math professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and a social entrepreneur and serial inventor, with a firsthand understanding of business, technology, employment, and scale. His innovations combine fields from math to the performing arts.

In this talk, he will share some of his recent work, which uses the perspective of game theory to align human incentives in a novel way. He invented new win-win ecosystems that facilitate mass-scale education of problem-solving (how to invent new solutions to previously-unseen problem types, which is not regularly taught in schools), while concurrently creating a social fabric of trusted and thoroughly human relationships that incentivize high-skill people to contribute their skills to others, rather than selfishly accumulating resources. He will also share his personal journey which helped him accumulate these insights about human incentives: by embarking on the highest-density public speaking tour ever conducted by a professor.

This work has previously been covered in CNN and the Wall Street Journal.