A 1-day symposium to launch the AHA research program 

AI is here to stay, but how do we ensure that people flourish in a world of pervasive AI use? The MIT Media Lab’s Advancing Humans with AI (AHA) research program is excited to announce its inaugural symposium with a goal of discussing what is arguably one of the most important questions of our time: What future with AI do we want to live in and how can we design and deploy AI that improves the human experience? 

In person attendance at the MIT Media Lab is upon invitation only, but the symposium will be streamed online. For more information: contact aha@media.mit.edu.

The AI community is almost solely focused on reaching AGI and optimizing models to make them more accurate, efficient, equitable and safe. But few researchers are asking how we can optimize the design of AI for people? While AI offers great potential to improve the human experience, its pervasive use may simultaneously lead to negative human outcomes such as overreliance and misplaced trust, loss of understanding, agency and skills, misinformation and manipulation, privacy erosion, social isolation, and unhealthy attachments. The symposium will debate what human outcomes we may want to optimize for, issues such as human agency, enlightenment, meaning, independence, understanding, and connectedness, and what approaches and methods may support them.

The inaugural AHA symposium will bring together leading experts and innovators from industry and academia to discuss possible futures with AI that elucidate these questions and help us make informed decisions. The history of social media offers a warning: while originally developed with the aim of strengthening social connections, widespread use has resulted in unanticipated consequences including increased polarization, a loss of truth, increased rates of anxiety and depression, higher loneliness, a loss of privacy and more. As AI rapidly advances and permeates all aspects of our lives, we need to ask: what do people stand to gain or lose when AI is used ubiquitously?

Panels, talks and discussions will dive into AI’s impact along several dimensions of human existence including: 

Interior life, examining personal growth and emotional wellbeing, 

Social life, examining interpersonal connections and social information networks,

Vocational life, examining professional fulfillment and the future experience of work, 

Cerebral life, examining learning, creativity and intellectual growth, and

Creative life, examining how we express ourselves and create meaningful experiences. 

In between panel sessions, Media Lab researchers will present thought provoking demonstrations and sneak peeks into relevant research.

Agenda

8:30 AM Registration & Breakfast

9:00 AM Welcome – Pattie Maes & Pat Pataranutaporn, MIT Media Lab 

9:20 AM  Session 1: What does it mean to flourish in the age of AI?

Moderator: Pattie Maes, Professor at MIT Media Lab, Co-director of AHA

• Arianna Huffington, Co-founder of HuffPost, Founder and CEO of Thrive Global
• Douglas Rushkoff, Author of Team Human, Professor at the City University of New York
• Tristan Harris, Executive director and Co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology

10:10 AM Coffee break | Demos and Inspiration Stations

10:30 AM Research Provocations

10:50 AM Session 2: Interior Life  

Moderator: Pat Pataranutaporn, Co-director of AHA, MIT Media Lab

• Sandhini Agarwal, Member of Technical Staff, Trustworthy AI team lead, OpenAI
• Sherry Turkle, Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, MIT

• Rosalind Picard, Professor at MIT Media Lab, Director of Affective Computing Research

11:40 AM Research Provocations   

11:50 AM Session 3: Social Life

Moderator: Deb Roy, Professor at MIT Media Lab, Director of MIT Center for Constructive Communication 

• David Rand, Professor of Management Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT
• Mor Naaman, Professor of information science at Cornell Tech
• Jonnie Penn, Professor of AI Ethics and Society, University of Cambridge

12:40 PM Lunch

1:40 PM Research Provocations 

1:50 PM Session 4: Vocational Life

Moderator: Andrew Lippman, Senior research scientist, Associate Director of MIT Media Lab

• Isabella Loaiza, Postdoctoral Researcher at the MIT Sloan Schoolof Management
• Jamie Teevan, Chief Scientist and Technical Fellow at Microsoft
• Brendan McCord, Founder & Chair, Cosmos Institute

2:40 PM Research Provocations 

2:50 PM Session 5: Cerebral Life

Moderator: Cynthia Breazeal, Professor at MIT Media Lab, Director of Personal Robots group, MIT dean for digital learning

• Mitchel Resnick, Professor at MIT Media Lab, Director of Lifelong Kindergarten group
• Howard Gardner, Professor at School of Education, Harvard University
• Pat Yongpradit, Chief Academic Officer at Code.org, Lead of TeachAI

3:40 PM Coffee break | Demos and Inspiration Stations

4:10 PM Research Provocations

4:20 PM Session 6: Creative Life 

Fireside chat between: 

• Tod Machover, Professor at MIT Media Lab, Director of Opera of the Future Group
• Jaron Lanier, Prime Unifying Scientist, Office of the CTO, Microsoft

5:00 PM Closing Remarks – Pattie Maes & Pat Pataranutaporn

5:30 PM Program ends