Oxford University this week shut down an academic institute run by one of Elon Musk's favorite philosophers. The Future of Humanity Institute, dedicated to the long-termism movement and other Silicon Valley-endorsed ideas such as effective altruism, closed this week after 19 years of operation. Musk had donated 1m to the FIH in 2015 through a sister organization to research the threat of artificial intelligence. He had also boosted the ideas of its leader for nearly a decade on X, formerly Twitter. The center was run by Nick Bostrom, a Swedish-born philosopher whose writings about the long-term threat of AI replacing humanity turned him into a celebrity figure among the tech elite and routinely landed him on lists of top global thinkers. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Tesla chief Musk all wrote blurbs for his 2014 bestselling book Superintelligence.

In 2020, Elon Musk said artificial intelligence would surpass human intelligence within five years, on its way to becoming "an immortal dictator." A new book says no way, not ever. The book, Why Machines Will Never Rule the World: Artificial Intelligence without Fear (Routledge, 2022), argues against the possibility of engineering machines that can surpass human intelligence. Coauthors are Barry Smith, professor in the philosophy department at the University at Buffalo and Jobst Landgrebe, senior research associate in the philosophy department and founder of Cognotekt, a German AI company. Machine learning and all other working software applications--the proud accomplishments of those involved in AI research--are for Smith and Landgrebe far from anything resembling the capacity of humans.

You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. In 2020, Elon Musk said artificial intelligence would surpass human intelligence within five years, on its way to becoming "an immortal dictator." A new book says no way, not ever. The book, Why Machines Will Never Rule the World: Artificial Intelligence without Fear (Routledge, 2022), argues against the possibility of engineering machines that can surpass human intelligence. Coauthors are Barry Smith, professor in the philosophy department at the University at Buffalo and Jobst Landgrebe, senior research associate in the philosophy department and founder of Cognotekt, a German AI company.

ACM fellow Dana Stewart Scott, the recipient jointly with Michael Rabin of the 1976 A.M. Turing Award for the concept of nondeterministic finite automata, has made seminal contributions spanning computing science, mathematics, philosophy, automata theory, modal logic, model theory, set theory, and the theory of programming languages. After receiving a B.A. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1950, and a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1958, he held faculty positions at the University of Chicago, UC Berkeley, and at Stanford, Princeton, Oxford, and Carnegie Mellon Universities. He retired as University Professor from CMU in 2003. The distinguished theoretical computer scientist Gordon Plotkin conducted a series of four oral history interviews of Scott between November 2020 and February 2021. The interviews, the transcripts and videos of which are online,a cover primarily the period leading up to the 1976 ACM A.M. Turing Award. Presented here is a condensed and highly edited version, which includes some additional post-interview material provided by Scott. I was born in 1932 in Berkeley, CA, where I am now in retirement. We lived on a farm near Susanville when I started first grade in a one-room school-house.

Texas A&M University has joined a new nationwide program that aims to boost college-level curricula about responsible artificial intelligence. The university was selected as a participant in February through an application process headed by the College of Liberal Arts, the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research and the Department of Philosophy. Maria Escobar-Lemmon, associate dean for research and graduate education in the College of Liberal Arts, highlighted two objectives of the program. The first is to bring different points of view into the topic of artificial intelligence. "This program is being offered by the National Humanities Center, and it's an alliance between the National Humanities Center and Google that is intended to broaden the range of voices to include humanistic scholars so that we have people with different backgrounds, training and disciplinary perspectives engaging on the issue," Escobar-Lemmon said.

Henry E. Kyburg Jr., a renowned and respected professor of philosophy and computer science at the University of Rochester, died of acute pancreatitis Oct. 30 at the age of 79 at Strong Memorial Hospital. He was well-known for his cutting-edge studies of uncertain inference, which is the human process of reaching conclusions, and data mining, the process by which computers search for information in data or draw conclusions from it. Kyburg, Burbank Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy, was honored in 2007 with the University Award for Lifetime Achievement in Graduate Education. He was clearly admired by his students--who can be found working as pioneers themselves across all disciplines at research and educational institutions--for his insightful instruction, generous spirit, and relentless energy. "The last thing he said to me was'I would like a logic problem to work on,' because Henry was always scribbling, loved his work, and in general never stayed idle," said his wife Sarah Kyburg, who lived with her husband and eight children on their sustainable farm in Lyons, N.Y.