Leading AI Scholars Featured in New Oral Archive
Related Textbook, "AI and Humanity" Will Be Published Next Month
By Byron Spice
Artificial intelligence is the creation of human beings, including a number from Carnegie Mellon University. Now, AI is changing humans. It's a subject that Illah Nourbakhsh of the Robotics Institute and Jennifer Keating of the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Science explore in an interdisciplinary CMU course, "AI and Humanity."
Nourbakhsh and Keating have captured the thoughts of some leading AI scholars in a new oral archive that became available online this year. It includes video and transcripts from 22 people, including MIT's Daniela Rus, Harvard University's Barbara Grosz and Microsoft's Eric Horvitz, as well as a number of CMU faculty members such as Martial Hebert, David Danks, Mark Kamlet, Tuomas Sandholm and Jim Herbsleb.
"These are the founders of the field," said Nourbakhsh, the K&L Gates Professor of Ethics and Computational Technologies. "It's not a history project; it's about them being critical analysts of their field. They are talking about the future."
The release of the archive coincides with the publication next month by MIT Press of the textbook "AI and Humanity." Nourbakhsh and Keating, assistant dean for educational initiatives in the Dietrich College, wrote it for their course, which is part of Dietrich's Grand Challenge Seminar series for first-year students.