In a talk hosted by the Economics Society, Dr Manuela Veloso offered students a richly illuminating exploration of artificial intelligence, tracing its long development, revealing the principles that underpin its capabilities, and considering how its rapid evolution may reshape the ways we learn, work and understand the world.
Students Arushni and Samhita give their insight into the talk here:
We were honoured to have a talk by Dr Manuela Veloso on the very topical subject of AI. Although AI is so prevalent in our lives now, it has had a long history and progressed greatly to reach its current form.
We learned that AI functions using probability by categorising the data it is given and using these categories to predict the most likely answer to any question. Dr Veloso showed us examples of seemingly straightforward AI answers that were actually indicators of the extraordinary progress AI has made. AI is something that we can often take for granted but thanks to Dr Veloso’s talk, we have now learned to be in awe of AI every time we use it. We also appreciated gaining insight into how AI language models have evolved over time, becoming increasingly capable of understanding human speech patterns and adapting their responses to align with natural, conversational communication. As well as AI’s past, we also learned about its possible future impacts as it has already begun saving time for humans by completing tasks from scheduling to driving cars. Dr Veloso suggested that by using AI to help us with many of our tasks, humans can spend more time focussing on the tasks that require human intelligence, allowing us to make more progress across all fields. After the talk, Dr Veloso gave thoughtful answers to difficult questions such as the future of learning if humans begin to rely on AI for knowledge.
Overall, it was an incredibly insightful experience and we are very grateful to Dr Veloso for taking the time to speak to us.
