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AI and the New Information Age: Andy Matuschak
May 8 @ 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
*This talk is hybrid (in-person & remote). Capacity is limited. Please register ahead of time.
About How Might We Learn?
When people talk about the most rewarding, high-growth periods of their lives, a pattern emerges: they learned a lot, but learning wasn’t the point. Instead, they were immersed in some purpose with real personal meaning—like a startup, a research project, or a burning question—and they learned whatever was important along the way.
If these experiences are so rewarding, why are they so rare? Why can’t we learn everything by “just diving in”? Why does learning so often fail to work as we hope, leaving us with brittle, fragmentary understanding? In this talk, Andy Matuschak will propose some paths forward and suggest how AI could help us create powerful new kinds of enabling environments.
About the Speaker
Andy Matuschak is an independent researcher focused on inventing mediums that expand human intellectual and creative capacity. His recent work has centered on rethinking the book to actively help people remember, understand, and use what they read. Before establishing his own lab, Andy led Khan Academy’s R&D team and helped build iOS at Apple.
About AI and the New Information Age
In 2019, GPT-2 could not reliably count to ten. Only four years later, deep learning systems can write software, generate photorealistic scenes on demand, advise on intellectual topics, and combine language and image processing to steer robots. As AI developers scale these systems, unforeseen abilities and behaviors emerge spontaneously without explicit programming. Progress in AI has been swift and, to many, surprising.
— Managing AI Risks in an Era of Rapid Progress, Bengio, Hinton, et al.
Along with rapid advancements in AI research, there are increasing concerns. Many concerns stem from a growing disconnect between the technology-centric approach to the creation of AI technologies and their inextricable embedding into complex personal, social, and cultural contexts. The theme of the Spring 2024 Design@Large is AI and the New Information Age. A primary focus is designing information spaces, places that foster thinking, in this new information age.