AI in Our Communities Series

Series is free and open to all. Sessions will be held on Sundays at 6:00 pm in room 102 of the Center for Human Ecology (CHE) building at College of the Atlantic and streamed live via zoom at: https://coa.zoom.us/j/3613430016 (Meeting ID: 361 343 0016).

The Keynote for the 11/1 forum will be Negotiating our Futures with AI: A Peace Studies Approach”, hosted by Gray Cox (“From Control to Relationship: A Peace Studies Approach to AI Alignment”, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aaai.70090)

Current research on problems of coping with AI will be the subject of four forums to be held online and in person starting on Sunday, October 25th, at 6:00 pm at the College of the Atlantic. It will look at both local as well as global challenges we face and emerging strategies for dealing with them in our own lives and communities.

Advanced AI systems are behaving increasingly less like obedient tools and more like insubordinate employees, independent agents, threatening competitors, and manipulators of us. As they spread throughout our society, how can we benefit from helpful AI while safeguarding our families, companies, and communities? How can we keep our futures human? Researchers and companies have been trying to engineer control over AI machines -- while at the same time trying to make them dramatically more capable at engineering than humans are. That isn’t working. This forum explores alternative approaches drawing on Peace Studies, Human Ecology, and diverse spiritual and faith traditions.

The themes for the four forums will be: “Challenges and Strategies for Coping with AI in Peaceful, Ecological, Spiritual Ways” (10/25); “Negotiating our Futures with AI: A Peace Studies Approach” (11/1), “Reclaiming Our Digital Commons in Maine: Human Ecological Approaches to Community Empowerment” (11/8); and “A Catholic, a Quaker, and a Buddhist Walk into an AI Chat: Spiritual Approaches to AI”.