A collectivist, economic perspective on AI

Professor Michael Jordan is speaking at the Old Theatre, Old Building on Wednesday 21 October, from 6.30pm to 7.45pm. It's a public event, open both in-person and online, and it's part of the OLD.3.24 series at the LSE.

Jordan is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and he's coming to London to talk about how we think about AI. His main point is that we shouldn't just look at it as a single autonomous machine or agent, but as a 'collective' — the whole network of people, machines, institutions, markets, incentives and interactions it operates within. He's calling for AI research to bring together computational and inferential ideas with economic and social concepts, and the talk will be around how learning algorithms and economic mechanisms create intelligent systems.

He's not the only one on the bill. Professor Maximilian Kasy, from the University of Oxford, will be the discussant, and Professor Milan Vojnović will chair the session. Kasy's own research covers economic inequality, job guarantee programmes, and basic income, as well as the intersection of machine learning and economics — he also coordinates the Machine Learning and Economics Group at Oxford. Jordan himself is a Director of Research at Inria Paris, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, a Foreign Member of the Royal Society, and a Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

After the talk, there's a drinks reception in the Staff Common Room for anyone who wants to stick around. If you can't make it in person, a video will be put up on LSE's YouTube channel later on. It runs from 6.30pm to 7.45pm on Wednesday 21 October at the Old Theatre, Old Building.