AI, Politics, and Complex Systems
Don't Hope to Get Rid of Human Creativity
with Barry Smith
SUNY Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University at Buffalo, New York

Monday, April 15, 2024, H 6:30 pm | Duomo, OGR Torino

Full seating, active waiting list

Discorso Sergio Ricossa 2024, a project of the Bruno Leoni Institute with the support of Fondazione CRT

The event will be in English, with simultaneous translation

Can artificial intelligence ever surpass human creativity? What are the essential marks of human intelligence? And why are our most common interactions with AI still so unsatisfactory?

On April 15, in the OGR  Duomo, we will ponder the developments and applications of artificial intelligence with Barry Smith, one of the world's most cited contemporary philosophers and a professor at the University at Buffalo, New York.

Best known for his application of ontology to areas outside of philosophy, spanning from biomedical sciences to military and intelligence fields, Smith has recently published Why Machines Will Never Rule the World (Routledge 2023), written with Jobst Landgrebe, a philosopher, mathematician, and entrepreneur in the field of artificial intelligence.

Together they argue that an artificial intelligence that can equal or exceed human intelligence is impossible. This means that from the potential developments of ChatGPT to robots taking over the planet, many of the assumptions being developed around AI are just hyperbolic fantasies. A countercultural position supported by a great deal of evidence gathered from the fields of mathematics, physics, computer science, linguistics, and biology.

In short, don’t hope to get rid of human creativity.



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Barry Smith
Barry Smith is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University at Buffalo, New York, in the Departments of Biomedical Informatics, Neurology and Science, and Computer Engineering. He is also Director of the National Center for Ontological Research and Visiting Professor at the University of Lugano, Switzerland (USI). His research began with an investigation of the philosophical foundations of Austrian economics, which he extended in the direction of an Austrian a priori theory of law. In the early 2000s, he demonstrated how philosophical ontology helps solve the problems researchers face when trying to make use of data from human genome research as a means of understanding the concept of health and disease. Smith has been working on ontology in the military and intelligence fields since 2010. In this area, his proposals have recently been adopted by the U.S. Department of Defense and the intelligence community as an ontology framework.

The Discorso Sergio Ricossa is one of the public lectures organized by the Bruno Leoni Institute named after a great Italian economist and thinker, who served as honorary president of the Institute from its founding to 2012.