Are There Problems Beyond the Reach of AI | World Science Festival
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About this recording
Has artificial intelligence already surpassed human mathematicians? And if it has, what is left for humans to do? Scott Aaronson, director of the Quantum Information Center at the University of Texas at Austin, joins Brian Greene to examine what happens to mathematics now that AI systems are solving problems that stumped humans for decades if not longer.
Aaronson, who spent two years at OpenAI working on alignment, explains how anyone who still thinks AI hasn’t unseated human mathematicians as the most powerful theorem prover on earth is delusional. He and Brian consider what creativity means when a machine finds connections no specialist would have made, why Aaronson argues that humans are needed more urgently now than at almost any point in the past, and where responsibility for these systems should sit. The conversation closes on consciousness and the question of whether human intelligence is still special.
This program is part of the Rethinking Reality series, supported by the John Templeton Foundation.
Participant: Scott Aaronson Moderator: Brian Greene
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