Great Food. Big Questions. Deep Conversations.
Next Café:
Thurs, 24 Oct, 6-8pm
AI and designing in humanity
Free, with included homemade meal and a wine reception
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About our
topic
& speaker
Dr Eve Poole OBE
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.
Canon Dr Eve Poole OBE 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.
What is a Big Questions Café?
It’s a friendly, fun gathering 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.
We start with a wine reception, and our food will be a delicious homemade meal! It’s free, but we gratefully accept donations. Please RSVP on this site so we can best meet dietary needs!
Where:
Jesmond United Reformed Church, NE2 3AE
Who is sponsoring this and why?
The Café is sponsored by Jesmond United Reformed Church, with the Friends of Jesmond Library. Over the past year, we’ve engaged in community listening exercises and a ‘Futures Literacy’ session. What we heard was the need for improved community cohesion. We always think it’s best to have discussions around a table filled with good food, so we thought these ‘Big Questions Cafés’ might be a way to bring us all together. These cafés are offered up with no other expectation than for people to show up, share in a great meal together, and engage in discussion over big questions that help us identify what we can do together. There’s no charge as we see this as a ministry, but donations are gratefully accepted—just click the donations link when registering are contribute when you arrive.