Boston Chapter of the IEEE Computer Society and GBC/ACM

7:00 PM, Thursday, 4 December 2025

MIT Room 32-G449 (Kiva) and online via Zoom

Will Artificial Intelligence Be the End of Civilization, or the Beginning?

Henry Lieberman, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and Christopher Fry, MIT Media Lab, Sloan, IBM, startups (Retired)

Please register in advance for this seminar even if you plan to attend in person at

https://acm-org.zoom.us/webinar/register/8917630641635/WN_FKvNEH5NQAO5nzIM_jWxxw

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

Indicate on the registration form if you plan to attend in person. This will help us determine whether the room is close to reaching capacity. We plan to serve light refreshments (probably pizza) before the talk starting at around 6:30 pm. Letting us know you will come in person will help us determine how much pizza to order.

We may make some auxiliary material such as slides and access to the recording available after the seminar to people who have registered.

Abstract:

Popular press articles whipsaw the public between two starkly different views of Artificial Intelligence. On one hand, AI is presented as a magic genie that can solve all of our problems with superhuman intelligence. On the other hand, it's presented as an unprecedented threat to humanity, with the danger of loss of jobs, loss of privacy, automated discrimination, even some kind of "robot rebellion". No wonder the public is confused. Which is it?

We present a view that is different from both the self-interested promotion of the tech companies, and from the pessimism of the social critics. Believe it or not, the biggest value of AI will lie, not in simply improving the operations of today's industry and government, but in making it possible to have a more cooperative, less competitive world.

Our view is:

• Optimistic. Mitigating possible dangers of AI in today's society is important. But we don't want to let fear cause us to miss the potential for AI to tackle big problems people now think are intractable: war, poverty, climate, etc.

• Radical. Many tech boosters imagine simply pouring AI into today's economy and electoral politics. We think these systems need to be redesigned from scratch for the AI era. We have two concrete proposals: Makerism (economics) and Reasonocracy (governance).

• Original. Not conventionally Left or Right, though our ideas share some design goals with both sides. Not (yet) heard on mainstream or activist media.

About the speakers:

Henry Lieberman is a Research Scientist in the InfoLab group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL). His career started at the original MIT AI Lab in the 1970's, with Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert, and he was head of the Software Agents Group at the MIT Media Lab. He pioneered real-time memory management, prototype object systems, and Programming by Example. He works at the intersection of AI and HCI, and was twice program chair of the ACM Intelligent User Interfaces conference. He served a term on the AAAI Executive Committee. He has a BS in math from MIT, and an HDR (PhD equivalent) from the Sorbonne in Paris, where he was also a visiting professor. He has about 120 publications and four books.

Fry moved to Boston in 1973 to attend Berklee College of Music (the MIT of Jazz). Realizing his musical skills needed augmentation, he moved across the river to MIT (The Berklee of Computers). He’s worked at BBN, IBM, MIT’s Experimental Music Studio, MIT Sloan (Business) School, MIT Media Lab, and a host of start-ups. He’s written languages for music composition, general purpose computing, decision support, and robotics. He also works on Personal Rapid Transit, an innovative "packet-switched" transportation network.

Directions to 32-G449 - MIT Stata Center, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA: Please use the main entrance to the Stata Center at 32 Vassar Street (the entrance closest to Main street) as those doors will be unlocked. Upon entering, proceed to the elevators which will be on the right after passing a large set of stairs and a MITAC kiosk. Take the elevator to the 4th floor and turn right, following the hall to an open area; 32-G449 will be on the left. Location of Stata on campus map

This joint meeting of the Boston Chapter of the IEEE Computer Society and GBC/ACM will be hybrid (in person and online).

Up-to-date information about this and other talks is available online at https://ewh.ieee.org/r1/boston/computer/. You can sign up to receive updated status information about this talk and informational emails about future talks at https://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/ieee-cs, our self-administered mailing list.

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