Tuesday, April 30th @ 6p | Cole Assembly Room, Converse Hall, Amherst College
Since our founding in 2019, the AI in the Liberal Arts initiative at Amherst College has worked to engage a thoughtful and interdisciplinary community in conversation and critical thought around artificial intelligence. We value exploring the complex and sometimes dizzying questions surrounding what the existence of artificial intelligence and its growing prevalence in our lives and work means for us as human beings. In 2022, we discovered a book that resonated with some our biggest questions and concerns and did so in entirely human way. The book was God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning (Penguin Random House, 2022), its author, Meghan O’Gieblyn.
AILA is over-the-moon to announce that author, essayists, and deep-thinker, Meghan O’Gieblyn will join AILA founder, Lee Spector in an evening of conversation about some of the big questions raised in her book and by everyday life in the age of AI.
The event is open to the public and will be held in the Cole Assembly Room in Converse Hall at Amherst College on Tuesday, April 30, 2024 @6pm. We can’t wait to see you there!
Bios:
Lee Spector is the Class of 1993 Professor of Computer Science at Amherst College. He received a B.A. in Philosophy from Oberlin College in 1984, and a Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland in 1992. Dr. Spector teaches and conducts research in artificial intelligence, artificial life, and a variety of areas at the intersections of computer science with cognitive science, physics, evolutionary biology, and the arts.
Meghan O’Gieblyn writes essays, features, and criticism for Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, n+1, The Point, The Baffler, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The New York Times, and other publications. She is the recipient of three Pushcart Prizes and the 2023 Benjamin H. Danks Award from American Academy of Arts and Letters, and my essays have been included in The Best American Essays and The Contemporary American Essay anthologies. Her first book, Interior States, won the 2018 Believer Book Award for nonfiction. O’Gieblyn also writes an advice column for Wired. Her book God, Human, Animal, Machine was published by Doubleday in 2021.
Join me in thanking our partners:
Department of Religion, Office of the President, Faculty Lecture Fund, and the Center for Religious & Spiritual Life