Author talk with Gray Cox: "Smarter Planet or Wiser Earth? How Dialogue Can Transform Artificial Intelligence into Collaborative Wisdom"

Description

Our planet is being transformed by “smart” systems using artificial intelligence designed to achieve one or a few values ever more efficiently. To better take into account the host of values that make life in our communities just, convivial, ecologically sustainable, and spiritually nourishing, we need systems that are “wiser, not just smarter”. We need to change the conception of rationality at the core of mainstream economics, politics, technology, and ethics.

This book provides an analysis of the challenges and systematic strategies to address them. It draws on the best of contemporary research on conflict resolution and peacemaking including Quaker, Gandhian, Indigenous, and other traditions to articulate methods of collaborative reasoning and ethical choice. It describes specific ways to use these methods to transform the ways we teach ethics and run our economy, politics, and technology. That includes redesigning the AI systems and practices that govern our world by shifting to new forms of programming that draw on collaborative dialogue instead of relying solely on monological forms of linear algorithmic inference. It offers paths to spirit-led, collaborative wisdom and partnerships with researchers and activists creating solutions to existential threats from ecological collapse, climate change, wars of mutually assured destruction, and out-of-control technology.

 Gray Cox teaches philosophy, peace studies, language learning, and artificial intelligence as part of the College of the Atlantic’s program in Human Ecology.  He has been long involved in the development of international studies and languages at COA and led a number of study abroad programs in Mexico and France. He has written a wide variety of papers and three books: The Ways of Peace: A Philosophy of Peace as Action (1986); The Will at the Crossroads: A Reconstruction of Kant’s Moral Philosophy (1983); A Quaker Approach to Research: Collaborative Practice and Communal Discernment (2014. A fourth, From a Smarter Planet to a Wiser Earth: Artificial Intelligence and Collaborative Wisdom will be published in 2022.  He is a long-term member of Acadia Friends Meeting and is also a co-founder and the current Clerk of the Quaker Institute for the Future.  QIF is a think tank that supports published research that is both informed by Quaker values like peace and ecological resilience and employs methods of spirit-led, communal discernment He is a singer/songwriter who plays guitar, bones a little clarinet, and has done several albums of original music in English, Spanish, and French. His studies included a B.A. at Wesleyan University, in 1974, and an M. A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy, at Vanderbilt University, in 1981. He grew up in Bar Harbor, Maine.