Talk presented Henry Kautz, winner of the Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Lecture Award, at the 34th Annual Meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2020) in New York, NY on February 10, 2020.

Dr. Kautz received the award for “outstanding research contributions in the area of knowledge representation, data analytics, and data mining of social media for public good.”

Link to the slides. https://www.cs.rochester.edu/u/kautz/talks/Kautz%20Engelmore%20Lecture.pdf

Abstract: The first AI summer was based on optimism about the power of general power solving, and the second on the power of knowledge engineering. Advances in machine learning have brought us into the third AI summer. This time, however, the stakes are incalculably higher than in the past. The danger is not just, as before, that marketplace hype and an overly narrow scientific focus will lead to disillusionment and retrenchment; but rather that AI now works well enough that it can be used – and is already being used – to eliminate human freedom and dignity. A dystopian future is not inevitable; progress in AI might instead usher in an era of unprecedented prosperity, knowledge, and freedom. This talk will explore the scientific, social, and geopolitical forces at play in the third AI summer.