Deschutes Tech Guild - May Meetup

Welcome to the Deschutes Tech Guild! Join us every second Tuesday at Embark for food, drinks, and tech talks.

Who: Brian Rabern
What: Your Digital Twin and Rational Choice

Detail:
What happens when an AI model can predict your decisions with striking accuracy? Imagine a “digital twin” trained on the exhaust of your digital life -- your commits, messages, purchases, searches, and habits. Over time it learns how you deliberate, what tempts you, and how you choose under risk. It’s not just a profile; it’s a behavioral simulation that can run counterfactuals and forecast what you would do in novel situations. This talk connects that idea to a classic puzzle in decision theory, the field that studies how we ought to decide among options given our beliefs, preferences, and uncertainty. We’ll explore how prediction, counterfactual reasoning, and game theory interact, and what rationality demands when predictions about you shape the outcomes you face. Can our ordinary principles of rational choice survive in a world of highly accurate predictive systems?

About the speaker:
Brian is a Senior Software Engineer at Niche, where he builds production AI systems and voice agents powered by large language models. Before moving into industry, he spent a decade as a professor of logic and language at the University of Edinburgh, where he published widely, taught courses ranging from formal semantics to AI ethics, and co-founded and co-developed Elogic, an internationally licensed platform for teaching symbolic logic. He continues research at the intersection of logic, philosophy, and machine intelligence.

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