Will AI help humanity or harm it? A prominent researcher and cognitive scientist sounds the alarm over Big Tech’s role in the future of AI.

This event was originally scheduled to take place on September 18.

In his new book, Taming Silicon Valley, Gary Marcus warns readers that current AI is both morally and technically inadequate—and Big Tech has effectively captured policymakers, playing both the public and the government. AI technology is too important to cede to corporate control, and the decisions we make now will shape our next century. Marcus lays bare two possible futures: AI revolutionizes science, medicine, and technology and delivers us a world of abundance and better health; or, if corporate powers are left unchecked, we could head toward disasters like the downfall of democracy, or even extinction.

Marcus discusses with journalist Julia Angwin what we need to do as a society, and as individual citizens, to safeguard our democracy and our future to create a thriving, AI-positive world. 

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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Gary Marcus is a leading voice in artificial intelligence. He is a scientist, best-selling author, and serial entrepreneur (Founder of Robust.AI and Geometric.AI, acquired by Uber). He is well-known for his challenges to contemporary AI, anticipating many of the current limitations decades in advance, and for his research in human language development and cognitive neuroscience.

An Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU, he is the author of five books, including, The Algebraic Mind, Kluge, The Birth of the Mind, and the New York Times bestseller Guitar Zero. He has often contributed to The New Yorker, Wired, and The New York Times. His book Rebooting AI, with Ernest Davis, is one of Forbes’s 7 Must Read Books in AI.

Julia Angwin is an award-winning investigative journalist, a bestselling author, a New York Times contributing Opinion writer, and a Walter Shorenstein Media and Democracy Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.

She is the founder of Proof News, a nonprofit journalism studio that launched in 2024. In 2018, she founded The Markup, a nonprofit newsroom that  investigates the impacts of technology on society. From 2014 to 2018, Julia was a senior reporter at the independent news organization ProPublica, where she led an investigative team that was a Finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting in 2017 and won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2018.

From 2000 to 2013, she was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where she led a privacy investigative team that was a Finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting in 2011 and won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2010. In 2003, she was on a team of reporters at The Wall Street Journal that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting for coverage of corporate corruption.

She is also the author of the New York Times bestseller Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance (Times Books, 2014) and Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America (Random House, March 2009).

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ACCESSIBILITY NOTES

In-Person

• Assistive listening devices and/or hearing loops are available at the venue.
• You can request a free ASL (American Sign Language) interpretation or CART (Communication Access Real-Time Translation) captioning service by emailing your request at least two weeks in advance of the event: email accessibility@nypl.org or use this Gmail template.
• This venue is fully accessible to wheelchairs.

Livestream

• Captions and a transcript will be provided.
• Media used over the course of the conversation will be accompanied by alt text and/or audio description.
• You can request a free ASL (American Sign Language) interpretation by emailing your request at least two weeks in advance of the event: email accessibility@nypl.org or use this Gmail template.

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