Steven Pinker: Tech Prophecy and the Underappreciated Causal Power of Ideas There is no law of complex systems that says that intelligent agents must turn into ruthless megalomaniacs. David Deutsch: Beyond Reward and Punishment Misconceptions about human thinking and human origins are causing corresponding misconceptions about AGI and how it might be created. Tom Griffiths: The Artificial Use of Human Beings Automated intelligent systems that will make good inferences about what people want must have good generative models for human behavior. Anca Dragan: Putting the Human into the AI Equation In the real world, an AI must interact with people and reason about them. People will have to formally enter the AI problem definition somewhere. Chris Anderson: Gradient Descent Just because Al systems sometimes end up in local minima, don’t conclude that this makes them any less like life. Humans—indeed, probably all life-forms—are often stuck in local minima. David Kaiser: “Information” for Wiener, for Shannon, and for Us Many of the central arguments in The Human Use of Human Beings seem closer to the 19th century than the 21st. Wiener seems not to have fully embraced Shannon’s notion of information as consisting of irreducible, meaning-free bits. Neil Gershenfeld: Scaling Although machine making and machine thinking might appear to be unrelated trends, they lie in each other’s futures. W. Daniel Hillis: The First Machine Intelligences Hybrid superintelligences such as nation states and corporations have their own emergent goals and their actions are not always aligned to the interests of the people who created them. Venki Ramakrishnan: Will Computers Become Our Overlords? Our fears about AI reflect the belief that our intelligence is what makes us special. Alex “Sandy” Pentland: The Human Strategy How can we make a good human-artificial ecosystem, something that’s not a machine society but a cyberculture in which we can all live as humans—a culture with a human feel to it