Third Thursday | AI for Humans

Third Thursday — October 15th, 6:30 to 8:30 PM
Five questions about the machines, and one question about your host

Somewhere right now, some very clever people are trying to build a mind that can outthink yours. They’d prefer you didn’t lose sleep over it.

This month’s documentary takes on the questions everyone is quietly asking about artificial intelligence, and it handles them with dry British wit and some unsettling candor:

• What is “superintelligence,” really?
• Is it coming for my job?
• What actually happens in the two seconds after I ask a chatbot a question?
• What if it all goes right?
• And can I trust anything it tells me?

Along the way you’ll meet a Bletchley Park codebreaker who warned in 1965 that a sufficiently clever machine might be “the last invention” we ever need to make. You’ll see entry-level jobs quietly disappear, and companies sheepishly rehire the humans they replaced. Data centers draw as much power as small cities, enough that Three Mile Island is coming back online to feed them. An AI cracks a 50-year-old biology puzzle and helps win a Nobel Prize. A Swedish cancer-screening program catches tumors that doctors missed. And a synthetic “actress” suddenly starts speaking Cantonese on live television.

One piece of advice: watch your host closely. By the end of the evening, you may have some questions about who, or what, has been talking to you all night.

As humanists, we put our trust in evidence, reason, and human judgment, and few technologies test all three the way this one does. Join us for the film, then stay for a conversation about what we want from these machines, who gets to decide, and how a thinking person can tell what’s real anymore.

Free and open to the public. Curious skeptics are especially welcome.