On October 10, 2018, Steve Omohundro will speak in the “Social Media Storms Workshop” put on by the Nautilus Institute, the Preventive Defense Project at Stanford, and Technology for Global Security. It is funded by the MacArthur Foundation.

We have seen the huge impact of “social media storms” across Facebook, Twitter, and other social media networks. Often these storms are driven by fake news, false alarms, extremist positions, and other forces of memetic contagion. How can we understand the dynamics? How can we detect when social media storms are happening? When they are dangerous? What are the best ways to dampen them down? To stop them? To guide them in a positive direction?

Steve Omohundro will discuss the role that AI has in creating fake news (eg. the DeepFakes synthetic video software), in forming memetic storms, in detecting these storms, and in stopping them.

On September 19, 2018 from 3-7:30, Steve Omohundro will present at the “Responsible AI/DI Summit 2018” at SAP Labs in Palo Alto. The event is sponsored by SAP, Qantellia, and Carol Tong Consulting. There is an excellent group of presenters who will provide a multi-disciplinary perspective on these important issues. Steve will be in the panel on “Pulling it all Together: Balancing Organization Goals with Responsibility in Complex Decisions”:

https://aidisummit.org/#agenda

The intention of the summit is to bring a sense of “trusteeship” to emerging powerful technologies. The decision methodologies of “Decision Intelligence” will be essential in guiding the deployment of AI and other powerful technologies.

Registration is free!

I’m very excited that more companies and governments are thinking about the ethical issues involved with AI. Two great examples are SAP and Google. SAP just published their 7 ethical AI guidelines:

German firm’s 7 commandments for ethical AI

https://www.france24.com/en/20180918-german-firms-7-commandments-ethical-ai

and Google published their AI principles a few months ago:

AI at Google: our principles

https://www.blog.google/technology/ai/ai-principles/

Edge.org is a wonderful online version of “The Reality Club” and had a yearly tradition of inviting diverse thinkers to respond to stimulating questions over the 20 years from 1998 until 2018. For the final question, they invited a wide variety of people to give their own answer to: “What is the last question?”

Steve Omohundro’s response was:

How did our sense of mathematical beauty arise?

Other’s responses are here:

https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-the-last-question

Steve is interested in the question of mathematical beauty because it represents an inner sense of what abstract models, knowledge, and inference is valuable that seems rather disconnected from ordinary evolutionary pressures. If we can fully understand the nature of mathematical beauty, I think it will shed light on unique aspects of human cognition.

Edge.org is a wonderful online version of “The Reality Club” and had a yearly tradition of inviting diverse thinkers to respond to stimulating questions over the 20 years from 1998 until the final question in 2018. The responses were turned into books and published on the Edge website. The 2017 question was “What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known?” Steve Omohundro’s response was this essay on the topic of “Costly Signalling”:

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27076