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St. Petersburg Conference on World Affairs expands with first sold-out mini-conference on AI [Audio]

Megan Holmes

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Click the arrow above to listen to the full conversation between computer scientist Nicolas Sabouret and St. Pete Catalyst publisher Joe Hamilton in the Catalyst studio.

The term “artificial intelligence” has been so tainted by science fiction that for most it carries images of dystopian futures, homicidal robots and epic Steven Spielberg movies. But according to  AI expert Nicolas Sabouret, the first thing people should know when about artificial intelligence when putting it in layman’s terms, is that artificial intelligence is not really about intelligence at all.

“What machines do is computation, something they do very well,” Sabouret said in advance of his artificial intelligence presentation for the St. Petersburg Conference on World Affairs Nov. 6. “Artificial intelligence is the science that makes machines do things by computation that human beings do with their intelligence. It’s not about the machine being intelligent.”

Sabouret used chess as an example in explaining how artificial intelligence works through computation. There are more combinations of games in chess than the number of atoms in the entire universe, he said. With so many possibilities, machines are far better able to discover new paths or types of games than human beings could think of. “Still it doesn’t mean the machine has created something new. It has just applied the rules and explored the very wide space of possible games in such a way that no human being could do it.”

While the solution the machine finds might be novel, its way of finding the solution is not. “It did not invent a process, just discovered a solution,” Sabouret explained. “Perhaps no one had thought of playing that way, but the way they did it was not original, it was just brute force computational.”

Part of our ability to create machines that work through problems successfully with artificial intelligence is a deep human understanding of the problem, Sabouret explained. When we clearly understand the problem, we can write an algorithm and use the machine to solve it,  making it unsurprising that machines could surpass our abilities in games like Go and chess, driving or facial recognition.

As for the future, however, Sabouret believes that robots becoming more human-like would not be a bad thing, as they could interact with us better with more human-like behavior. But he does not see a dystopian future of robots taking over the world any time soon.

Sabouret, a celebrated computer scientist and assistant professor at LIP6 Laboratory in Paris, France was unable to attend this year’s Conference on World Affairs, held annually in February. Instead, his presentation became the first of what organizers hope will be many mini-conferences held throughout the year.

“There had been a demand for some time from our attendees for us to organize one-off events at other times in the year, and we also knew there was interest in the topic of artificial intelligence,” said Diane Seligsohn, president of the St. Petersburg Conference on World Affairs. “We aim to connect what is happening in St. Pete to what is going on internationally. Bringing Professor Sabouret over from France to engage in discussion with local experts enabled us to do just that for the subject of AI.”

The mini-conference on artificial intelligence was a sold-out event at the Kate Tiedemann College of Business at USF St. Petersburg. Such a strong response demonstrated the success of the experiment, and showed a community hungry for future mini-conferences.

While Sabouret was in St. Petersburg, he also spoke to students at Shorecrest Middle School, Lakewood High School and USF St. Peterburg, extending the conference’s reach into the community, a practice the conference will seek to replicate during its 8th annual St. Petersburg World Affairs Conference to be held February 18-21, 2020.

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