HSFC Hosts Leading Expert of Artificial Intelligence
Posted on 19th June 2024
Professor Sir Nigel Richard Shadbolt, Principal of Jesus College, Oxford giving a talk on Artifical Intelligence at HSFC.
As the final event in Hereford Sixth Form College’s 50th anniversary celebrations, the Debate Society hosted one of UK's foremost experts in artificial Intelligence, Professor Sir Nigel Richard Shadbolt Principal of Jesus College, Oxford. The debate turnout was the largest of the year, with around 150 students present from multiple departments as well as a full turnout from the Computer Science students.
Professor Sir Nigel Richard Shadbolt is an interdisciplinary researcher, policy expert and commentator whose research focuses on understanding how intelligent behaviour is embodied and emerges in humans, machines and, most recently, on the internet. He is also chairman of the Open Data Institute which he co-founded with Tim Berners-Lee.
He began his talk with the beginnings of AI; covering the pioneering work of Alan Turing which without doubt saved many lives and may even have shortened the war by up to 2 years. He stressed that although AI can sound and act like humans, there is no sentience behind the algorithms.
He then covered the historical development with the famous defeat of world chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov by an IBM computer named Deep Blue in 1997.
This section of the talk stressed the development of transistors with stratospheric rise in power over the last few years. Moore’s Law observes that the number of transistors used in computers almost doubles every two years, said to be one of the reasons why AI has developed so quickly in recent years.
The final part: he outlined his view that AI if used properly and carefully is a tool for humanity's benefit rather than something to be feared. There was a lot here about the need for regulation, which is where he plugged his book As If Human: Ethics and Artificial Intelligence.
Group photo of Sir Nigel Richard Shadbolt, Head of Computer Science Emma Martin and Computer Science Students.