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Speaker:
Prof. Dr. Martin Maier, Optical Zeitgeist Laboratory, Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS), Montreal, Canada
Date: Thursday, 5 December 2024, 17:15
Location: room BIN 2.A.01 at the Department of Informatics (IfI), Binzmühlestrasse 14, 8050 Zürich (information here)
Details about the format of the talk shall be checked always just ahead of a certain presentation date: (information here)
Humankind’s transformation of the planet has created its own chapter in Earth history – the “Anthropocene,” or the Human Age. It denotes the geological event when human activity started to become the dominating force with significant impact on the planet’s ecosystems and climate. Another impactful human-created force is artificial intelligence (AI) and its rapid progress. In a recent Science article, a large group of worldwide leading AI experts warned that unchecked AI advancement could culminate in a large-scale loss of life and the biosphere, and the marginalization or even extinction of humanity. They urged that for AI to be a boon, we must reorient technical AI research and development; pushing AI capabilities is not enough. In the future, the main benefits of AI will be that it is different than us humans in that it incorporates the many other ways in which natural intelligence operates, especially in light of the emergence of generative AI models that have barely scratched the surface of embodied data modalities such as biology. In this seminar, we explore the benefits of abandoning the path dependence and “lock-in” of today’s Turing-derived anthropomorphic (i.e., human-like) AI vision and its main focus on automation and optimization by imitating humans and replacing them with machines. To reorient Turing’s AI vision, we provide new directions for the creation of a novel type of non-anthropocentric (i.e., non-human-like) AI that expands into nature’s more-than-human “NaturAlien” intelligence free from human bias to help us escape from current anthropocentric thinking and evade our conceptual dead ends, e.g., climate change.
Prof. Dr. Martin Maier is a full professor with the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS), Montréal, Canada. He was educated at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany, and received MSc and PhD degrees both with distinctions (summa cum laude) in 1998 and 2003, respectively. In 2003, he was a postdoc fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA. He was a visiting professor at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 2006 through 2007. He was a co-recipient of the 2009 IEEE Communications Society Best Tutorial Paper Award. Further, he was a Marie Curie IIF Fellow of the European Commission from 2014 through 2015. In 2017, he received the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt (AvH) Foundation in recognition of his accomplishments in research on FiWi-enhanced mobile networks. In 2017, he was named one of the three most promising scientists in the category “Contribution to a better society” of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) 2017 Prize Award of the European Commission. In 2019/2020, he held a UC3M-Banco de Santander Excellence Chair at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), Madrid, Spain. Recently, in December 2023, he was awarded with the 2023 Technical Achievement Award of the IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) Tactile Internet Technical Committee for his contribution on 6G/Next G and the design of Metaverse concepts and architectures as well as the 2023 Outstanding Paper Award of the IEEE Computer Society Bio-Inspired Computing STC for his contribution on the symbiosis between INTERnet and Human BEING (INTERBEING). He is co-author of the book “Toward 6G: A New Era of Convergence” (Wiley-IEEE Press, January 2021) and author of the sequel “6G and Onward to Next G: The Road to the Multiverse” (Wiley-IEEE Press, February 2023).
