Field Note #142. On "AI X-Risk Munk Debate"

Source: Bengio, Tegmark, LeCun, and Mitchell,"Munk Debate on Artificial Intelligence" (June 2023), avail. online (paywalled).

The Context.

Discursive and epistemological confusion descends upon the minds connected (loosely and tightly) to the AI epoch (i.e., all of us to some degree... unequivocally).  

To clean the mind, the debate topic organized by the Aurea Foundation (under the banner of "Munk Debates" in honor of the late Peter Munk) was as follows:

The debate featured Tegmark + Bengio on the affirmative vs. Mitchell + LeCun on the negative.  

While the debate did not clear up the confusion--or sufficiently mitigate it--the promise of communication was met, perhaps a nod to J. Habermas and even my former professor, Seyla Benhabib, who couldn't fathom my affinity for both high theory and hard-nose finance/investing.

That affinity seemingly has some directed purpose in frontier tech; viz. AI.  So, perhaps I shall press that direction harder for these more or less personal Field Notes in the coming days/weeks/months/years.

The Map.