Big questions café a friendly, fun gathering at Jesmond URC where we first share a meal and get to know others around our table. Then, just after we get pudding, we hear a 15-20 minute presentation addressing one of the big questions facing our lives and community. We’re then invited to discuss a series of questions arising from the presentation around our tables, digging deeper. There’s opportunities to engage with the speaker as well.
It’s a collaboration between a church and a community library to promote community cohesion. It’s not about promoting religion or trying to get people to think how ‘we’ do. It’s about bringing neighbours together for good food, big questions, and deep conversation. That’s it. And you’re welcome here.
Free homemade food and wine reception.
The café and the question:
24th October at 6pm: What do we owe the future? Artificial Intelligence and Designing in Humanity.
About our topic & speaker:
The speaker is: Canon Dr Eve Poole OBE. Eve has a BA from Durham, an MBA from Edinburgh, and a PhD in theology and capitalism from Cambridge. She has written several books, including Robot Souls and Leadersmithing, which was Highly Commended in the 2018 Business Book Awards. She was interim CEO of the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland (2023-2024), interim CEO at the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2022), Third Church Estates Commissioner (2018-2021), and first female Chairman of the Board of Governors at Gordonstoun (2015-2021). Previously she taught leadership at Ashridge Business School, following earlier careers at the Church Commissioners and Deloitte Consulting. She was awarded an OBE in 2023 for services to education and gender equality, and is a lay canon at York Minster.
Artificial Intelligence & Designing In Humanity
Two of the biggest design problems in Artificial Intelligence are how to build robots that behave in line with human values and how to stop them ever going rogue. One under-explored solution to these alignment and control problems might be to examine how these are already addressed in the design of humans. Looking closely at the human blueprint, it contains a suite of capacities that are so clumsy they have generally been kept away from AI. It was assumed that robots with features like emotions and intuition, that made mistakes and looked for meaning and purpose, would not work as well as robots without this kind of code. But on considering why all these irrational properties are there, it seems that they emerge from the source code of soul. Because it is actually this ‘junk’ code that makes us human and promotes the kind of reciprocal altruism that keeps humanity alive and thriving. Eve Poole’s book Robot Souls looks at developments in AI and reviews the emergence of ideas of consciousness and the soul. It places our ‘junk code’ in this context and argues that it is time to foreground that code, and to use it to look again at how we are programming AI. This talk will bring her argument to life and provide an opportunity for discussion about the questions it raises.