Join us at the Christian Study Center on Thursday, February 1st at 7:00 p.m. for a public lecture delivered by Dr. Lee Vinsel: "AI Is Going to Change Everything! ... Or Is It?: How To Think About New Technologies in a Deep, Rigorous, and Humanistic Fashion."
Wisdom, the virtue of making sound decisions that increase well-being, requires carefully weighing facts and balancing costs and benefits. Acting wisely in the context of new technologies can be difficult, however, because both utopian and dystopian forms of hype create unrealistic visions of near-term change and things taken to be “facts” turn out to not be so. Dr. Vinsel will draw on his work in The Innovation Delusion and examine more recent examples of hyped technologies, including generative AI, to argue that wisdom in the context of hype is hard but not impossible. Most of all it requires embracing the intellectual and spiritual dimensions of uncertainty—being real about the fact that, when it comes to so many things, we simply do not and cannot know.
Dr. Lee Vinsel, Assistant Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech, studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. He is the co-author of The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession With the New Has Disrupted the Work that Matters Most. Since 2015, with his collaborator Andy Russell, Vinsel has organized and led The Maintainers, a global interdisciplinary research network that examines maintenance, repair, and mundane work with technology.
A reception with food and drink will begin at 7:00 p.m. with the lecture starting at 7:30. Additional parking is available at First Lutheran (1801 NW 5th Avenue).