UCSB Arts & Lectures will present artificial intelligence (AI) pioneer Mustafa Suleyman in a conversation about the most controversial technological innovation of the 21st century – Artificial Intelligence.
Suleyman’s audiences can expect provocative discussions on the power and potential of AI to help solve humanity’s most urgent challenges.
Suleyman has spent years considering how technological advances impact society, and he cares deeply about the ethics and governance supporting new AI systems.
As co-founder of Inflection AI, former head of Applied AI at Google, and co-founder of DeepMind, Suleyman has been at the center of the AI revolution.
With a longstanding humanistic perspective driving his development, Suleyman sounds a warning about the unprecedented risks AI and other fast-proliferating technologies pose to global order, and shows how we might contain them while we have the chance.
A copy of Suleyman’s new book “The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma” is included with ticket purchase. Books may be picked up at the event.
The son of a taxi driver and a nurse, Suleyman grew up in central London, where he developed an altruistic point of view and a lifelong commitment to building a better world.
In 2001, sensing a disturbing rise in anti-Muslim sentiment in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, Suleyman dropped out of his philosophy program at Oxford to start the Muslim Youth Helpline, a free, confidential and culturally sensitive service counseling vulnerable young people.
This led to his appointment as a human rights officer in the administration of Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London.
Sensing that technology would be the dominant force in global development during his lifetime, in 2010, Suleyman co-founded DeepMind, a London-based technology research lab exploring what was then called “machine learning.”
Building on a broadly conceived and culturally inclusive concept of the term “intelligence,” DeepMind succeeded in solving a range of problems, and was acquired by Google in 2014 for $650 million.
At Google, Suleyman led teams inventing and deploying cutting edge AI systems to more accurately detect breast cancer in mammograms, to diagnose 50 different eye diseases in OCT scans, and to control Google’s multi-billion dollar data centers to optimize energy consumption.
On July 21, Suleyman joined a group of high-powered technical executives in a meeting with President Joe Biden at the White House to begin designing regulatory and other safeguards around AI.
Tickets are $25-$40: general public; UCSB students free with current student ID. For tickets or more information, call UCSB Arts & Lectures, 805-893-3535 or buy online at www.ArtsAndLectures.UCSB.edu.