Dan Huttenlocher ponders our human future in an age of artificial intelligence

What does it mean to be human in an age where artificial intelligence agents make decisions that shape human actions? That's a deep question with no easy answers, and it's been on the mind of Dan Huttenlocher SM '84, PhD '88, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, for the past few years. "Advances in AI are going to happen, but the destination that we get to with those advances is up to us, and it is far from certain," says Huttenlocher, who is also the Henry Ellis Warren Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Along with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and elder statesman Henry Kissinger, Huttenlocher recently explored some of the quandaries posed by the rise of AI, in the book, "The Age of AI: And Our Human Future." For Huttenlocher and his co-authors, "Our belief is that, to get there, we need much more informed dialogue and much more multilateral dialogue. Our hope is that the book will get people interested in doing that from a broad range of places," he says.