The 31st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 25th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJACI-ECAI 2022) is underway in Vienna. So far, participants have been treated to some excellent invited talks and a varied programme of workshops and tutorials. Find out what people have been up to in this round-up from the Twitter-sphere. Really enjoyed attending the workshop for AI Evaluation Beyond Metrics at #IJCAI2022 this weekend, in particular, @adinamwilliams presentation on "No Escape from Qualitative Evaluation" pic.twitter.com/aYvnPrUprU At the Workshop on Complex Data Challenges in Earth Observation.

Who is human, what is a machine, and who gets to decide where the boundaries lie?¹ In the field of AI research, who is included and who is excluded in the category of the human? The answer depends on whose knowledges, practices, and modes of living inform your analysis. The field of AI has been shaped significantly by its co-evolution with humanism and the ways that it is entangled with Western Enlightenment thinking, which assert that science and technology -- not, for example, art, religion and mysticism -- are the unquestioned drivers of innovation, linear human progress, and modernity. From the embedding of computing into the human body (e.g., Elon Musk's Neuralink) to the current obsession with (big) data-driven modeling to the media frenzy around Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin rocket launch -- this basic assumption is found in businesses, universities, and public policy.

There is a little known philosophy called Sentientism that is well founded in reality, provides a strong basis for compassionate ethics and will eventually become our predominant way of thinking. It commits to using evidence and reason and grants moral consideration to all sentient beings. This philosophy also gives us the best chance to solve the world's problems. Most people disagree with it. Let's go on a philosophical journey We start with using evidence and reason as the basis of our beliefs -- because reality is all there is.

Smart cities, search engines, autonomous vehicles: The pairing of massive data sets and self-learning algorithms is transforming the world around us in ways that are not always easy to grasp. The strange ways computers "think" are hidden within opaque proprietary code. It has been called the "end of theory." There is a danger, says Paola Sturla, Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, that human agency will be nudged out of the picture. Sturla, who is trained as an architect and landscape architect, has called on designers to renew the tradition of humanism.

As we relentlessly enter information into our EHRs, we typically perceive that we are just recording information about our patients to provide continuity of care and have an accurate representation of what was done. While that is true, the information we record is now increasingly being examined for many additional purposes. A whole new area of study has emerged over the last few years known as "real-world data," and innovators are beginning to explore how machine learning (currently employed in other areas by such companies as Amazon and Google) may be used to improve the care of patients. The information we are putting into our EHRs is being translated into discrete data and is then combined with data from labs, pharmacies, and claims databases to examine how medications actually work when used in the wide and wild world of practice. Let's first talk about why real-world data are important.

There is a little known philosophical position that, for me at least, is well founded in reality, provides a strong basis for compassionate ethics and will eventually become humanity's predominant way of thinking. Most people disagree with it and with me. Sentientism is an ethical philosophy that applies evidence and reason and grants moral consideration to all sentient beings. Sentient beings have sentience -- the capacity to experience -- both suffering and flourishing. Things that can't experience might be important in other ways, but they don't need our moral consideration.

Scott Cohen, co-founder of the large digital distribution company The Orchard, recently said that "there will be a number one song that's 100% AI-written." Which is a scary thought, not only because it will displace millions of people from work, but because it removes the creativity and humanism from music. It's not unthinkable that decades from now much of the music that we listen to will be created using advanced software that figures out the optimum beats and lyrics for record sales. Is that a world that we want to live in? Technology is great, it's awesome, and it's saving lives at a rapid pace, but to create music with it is a completely different situation.

If you haven't encountered any reviews of Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker's new bestseller Enlightenment Now--which would be amazing, given how many there have been--don't worry. I can summarize them in two paragraphs. The positive ones say Pinker argues convincingly that we should be deeply grateful for the Enlightenment and should put our stock in its legacy. A handful of European thinkers who were born a few centuries ago set our species firmly on the path of progress with their compelling commitment to science, reason, and humanism (where humanism means "maximizing human flourishing"). Things have indeed, as Pinker documents in great detail, gotten better in pretty much every way--materially, morally, politically--since then. And if we stay true to Enlightenment values, they'll keep getting better.

On this week's episode of my podcast, I Have to Ask, I spoke to Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard and author of the new book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. It follows up on his controversial best-seller The Better Angles of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, which offered a sweeping account of why Pinker believes the present is better than the past. Below is an edited transcript of the show. In it, we discuss why people have so much trouble with the notion of progress, whether global warming and nuclear weapons invalidate his thesis, and just how much of a threat Donald Trump and other demagogues are to our future. You can find links to every episode here; the entire audio interview is below. Please subscribe to I Have to Ask wherever you get your podcasts.

Of all the prejudices of pundits, presentism is the strongest. It is the assumption that what is happening now is going to keep on happening, without anything happening to stop it. If the West has broken down the Berlin Wall and McDonald's opens in St. Petersburg, then history is over and Thomas Friedman is content. If, by a margin so small that in a voice vote you would have no idea who won, Brexit happens; or if, by a trick of an antique electoral system designed to give country people more power than city people, a Donald Trump is elected, then pluralist constitutional democracy is finished. The liberal millennium was upon us as the year 2000 dawned; fifteen years later, the autocratic apocalypse is at hand. You would think that people who think for a living would pause and reflect that whatever is happening usually does stop happening, and something else happens in its place; a baby who is crying now will stop crying sooner or later. Exhaustion, or a change of mood, or a passing sound, or a bright light, something, always happens next. But for the parents the wait can feel the same as forever, and for many pundits, too, now is the only time worth knowing, for now is when the baby is crying and now is when they're selling your books.