Jonathan Zittrain: Sorting through AI's Big Picture Possibilities

Faculty Seminar: Knowledge Production and the University in the Age of AI

Jonathan Zittrain will lead discussion of this month’s faculty seminar on Knowledge Production and the University in the Age of AI. His talk is titled “Sorting through AI’s Big Picture Possibilities: Sketching the AI Triangle, and AI as DIY Product vs Remote Service.” Faculty and researchers from all Harvard schools welcome. Registration required.

How can we make sense of the (possible, contingent) transformations that AI will occasion, especially to our scholarly enterprise? First, it helps to try to nail down what AI’s current capabilities and plausible future prospects are. Both are in deep contention. I’ll lay out a way I’ve been sorting views about AI — among accelerationists, safetyists, and skeptics — and then, with the help of our colleague Jack Cushman, broach the question of how much large language models and their successors will be offered in a proprietary client-server model vs. a DIY open source, run-on-your-laptop mode. Any resolution of those divides will greatly impact the ways in which academia will interact with the technology and be able to understand and shape it for our work.

This seminar is sponsored by the Department of the History of Science and by the Harvard Data Science Initiative.