Fri 3 May - Christians in Science: Lecture on Artificial Intelligence
When: Friday 3rd May 2024, refreshments from 7pm, 7.30pm start - 9:30pm
Where: Redland Church Hall, BS6 7HE
Price: There is no entrance charge but if you can afford a donation, £5 would help cover our running costs.
An Invitation from Christians in Science to a lecture on Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence has wide ranging implications which are important for Christians to understand and respond to. This lecture provides an opportunity for Christians in the Bristol area to hear from an expert in the field who is also a committed Christian. We very much hope that you will feel able to advertise the lecture to your Church Family and wider Christian Network, and may even be able to attend yourself. Details of the lecture and speaker are given below
For more information about all our local CiS events please contact me (ahalestrap a_t hotmail d_o_t com) or visit https://www.cis.org.uk/groups/bristol/ and Facebook.com/cisbristol.
I hope we may see you on May 3rd.
With best wishes
Andrew
Professor Andrew Halestrap for CiS Bristol
The Speaker - Professor Nigel Crook
Nigel is Professor of AI and Robotics, Associate Dean for Research and Knowledge Exchange, and Director of the Centre for AI, Culture and Society at Oxford Brookes University. He graduated from Lancaster University with a BSc (hons) in Computing and Philosophy in 1982. He has a PhD in explainable intelligent machines and nearly 40 years of experience as a researcher in AI and lecturer in Computer Science. He is author of 'Rise of the Moral Machine: Exploring Virtue Through a Robot's Eyes' - see here. He is an expert reviewer for the European Commission and serves on several scientific committees for international conferences. His research interests include biologically inspired machine learning, social robotics and autonomous moral machines.
Location and time
May 3rd at 7.30 pm in Redland Church Hall, BS6 7HE.
Refreshments will be served from 7pm. The talk starts at 7.30pm and will be followed by time for questions with a formal close at 9.30pm. There is no entrance charge but if you can afford a donation, £5 would help cover our running costs.
The lecture - Consciousness, Creativity and Generative AI
Outline of talk: Generative AI (‘GenAI’) forms the latest in a series of Artificial Intelligence breakthroughs that have rocked the world. Each previous breakthrough has raised challenging questions about what it means to be human. The latest developments in GenAI, however, appear to challenge what is generally recognised as a core element of human nature; namely our creativity. In the past, human creativity has often been cited as what separates us from machines. But now, it seems there is no area of human creativity that is beyond reach for GenAI technology, be that creative writing, artwork, music, video, or the creative aspects of science and engineering, or even our ability to converse with other people. In this talk I will give a non-technical explanation of the underlying technologies that endow GenAI with these creative capacities and present a theologically framed case for the distinctive nature of human creativity.