Arntzen Grand Challenges Lecture: The Nature of AI's Intelligence

The Arntzen Grand Challenges Lecture series is inspired by Charles (Charlie) Arntzen, founding director of the ASU Biodesign Institute. Every year, the Arntzen lecture series hosts distinguished researchers to discuss the latest developments in nature-based science, research and solutions development. This year we are excited to welcome Melanie Mitchell, a James B. Alley Jr. Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, as our featured speaker. Today’s AI systems are able to solve thorny problems in mathematics, computing, and many areas of science. At the same time, they are prone to hallucination, unhumanlike errors, intractable biases and exhibit a confounding “jaggedness” in their intelligence. In this talk, Mitchell will describe how today’s state-of-the-art AI systems evolved from the earliest days of the field, how we can characterize their capabilities and trustworthiness and what certainties and uncertainties AI future holds. Melanie Mitchell’s research is at the intersection between artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and complex systems. She has authored or edited six books and published over 100 scholarly papers in these fields.