CFP: ICSA X 2024: "DNA + AI Superintelligence: Utopia or Dystopia?"

CALL  FOR  PAPERS   ICSA X. WORLD CONGRESS

DNA +  AI   SUPERINTELLIGENCE:  UTOPIA  OR  DYSTOPIA?

PASADENA,  CALIFORNIA,  USA, 19 October  2024 (online via Zoom)

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Suggested  Themes:

By the 21st century, humanity is at an inflection point: Advances in AI and genetic engineering promise unprecedented economic transformation, prosperity, leisure, and curing diseases, even expanding the human life span.  But the Fourth Industrial Revolution may also usher in an Orwellian Brave New World.  As fiction becomes fact, Orwell’s telescreen is now the more personalized iPhone that tracks, monitors, and potentially controls its user (China).  Tracking/control may become ubiquitous and inescapable with DNA-based AI, enabling universal tyranny.  Even more ominous are AI’s emergent qualities where AI programs develop new capabilities unknown to humans that concern AI creators.  AI developers at major companies like Alphabet/Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic seek government regulation, but retain an optimistic mind-set that belies potential challenges of new technologies.  Yet, there is an increasing awareness that superintelligent AI may become smarter than individual humans.  When AI can use Ernest Hemingway’s famous four words, “baby shoes; never worn,” to compose almost instantly a credible human-interest story, and even put it to verse, it reflects an AI genie as a superior poet or novelist.  But AI could just as easily become a “sorcerer’s apprentice.”  A technology that has no soul, conscience or free will may turn against its creators.  How can humanity tame the digital behemoth, and prevent a single line of doomsday code by a malevolent agent to end the human saga? Can human creativity control superintelligent AI? Of concern is potential impact on humanity of runaway or “rogue” AI, recognized by some AI creators, as in Open Letter on AI existential threat to humanity. How will AI affect human self-understanding in a world where robots can never “love us back” (Turkle 2017: 28)?  In sum, how can AI as a more ethical, humane technology benefit all without becoming humanity’s Master?

All conference participants must pre-register.  Abstracts (250 words) due: September 15, 2024: c/o Dr. O. Gruenwald, JIS Editor, 1065 Pine Bluff Drive, Pasadena, CA 91107, USA, per e-mail (no attachments) to: [email protected]. Include: Paper Title, First & Last Name, faculty or student, institution, mailing address, telephone & e-mail. Fully-developed papers will be considered for publication in the refereed Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies XXXVII 2025.  Web: https://www.jis3.org/icsax2024.