About this Event
What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? Micah 6:8.
This year's contribution to the annual Micah Lecture series will be on the subject of 'Robot Souls'. This lecture will be presented by 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 going rogue. One under-explored solution to these alignment and control problems might be to examine how they 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. These features looked like junk code, flaws in the human design, that AI would give us an opportunity to design out. But for Christians, made in the image of God, our assumption should be that we are perfectly designed for God's ends. So these cannot be design flaws, they must be purposeful. And on considering why all these irrational properties are there, it seems that they emerge from the source code of soul. Indeed, it seems that it is actually this ‘junk’ code that really makes us human.
Dr Eve Poole OBE is interim Chief Executive of the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland. She 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 at the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2022), Third Church Estates Commissioner (2018-2021) and 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.
This is the 11th social justice Micah Lecture; previous speakers include Bishop Steven Croft, Bishop David Walker, Bishop Pete Wilcox, Bishop Paul Bayes, Canon Lucy Winkett and Ann Morisy, Angus Richie, Bishop John Perumbalath, Dr Ruth Valerio and Chine McDonald, Dr Steven Horne, Rev Professor Kelly Brown Douglas.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Concert Room, Liverpool Cathedral, Saint James Road, Liverpool, United Kingdom
