The TU Wien public lecture series AI in Science and Engineering explores how AI is transforming these disciplines and features lectures by the internationally renowned scientists Edith Elkind, Kate Smith-Miles, Matthias Scheutz, Shahar Mendelson, and Kristian Kersting. 

Kristian Kersting, Reasonable AI!

The relationship between humans and machines, especially in the context of Artificial Intelligence (AI), is shaped by hopes, concerns, and moral questions. On the one hand, advances in AI offer great promise: it can help us solve complex problems, improve healthcare, streamline workflows, and much more. Yet there are legitimate concerns about control over this technology, its potential impact on jobs and society, and ethical issues related to discrimination and the loss of human autonomy. In the talk, I explore and illustrate the complex tension between innovation and moral responsibility in AI research. The focus will be on a vision of AI that combines the intuitive learning of Kahneman’s System 1 with the reflective thinking of System 2, enabling AI systems that not only recognize but also understand.

Prof. Dr. Kristian Kersting is a co-director of the Hessian Center for AI (hessian.AI), head of the research department “Foundations of Systemic AI” at the German Research Center for AI (DFKI), and a professor of AI and Machine Learning at TU Darmstadt. After receiving his PhD at the University of Freiburg in 2006, he was with MIT, Fraunhofer IAIS, the University of Bonn, and TU Dortmund University. He is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of AI (AAAI), the European Association for AI (EurAI), and the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), a book author (“How Machines Learn”), and received the inaugural German AI Award 2019. He wrote a regular AI column in the German newspaper Welt (am Sonntag).