Amsterdam Lectures in AI and Society

Melanie Mitchell, leading AI researcher from the Santa Fe Institute and key voice in the discussions on the abilities and inabilities of Large Language Models, will speak at Amsterdam Science Park.

ALiAS 2025

Friday, May 16th, 2025, 3pm, Lab42, room SP L1.02, Amsterdam Science Park

ILLC’s Computational Linguistics Seminar and the CLClab are very happy to announce the 2025 edition of the Amsterdam Lectures in AI and Society (ALiAS’25), with professor Melanie Mitchell from the Santa Fe institute. Melanie Mitchell has been a leading researcher in Artificial Intelligence for decades, a great communicator about the technology for a broad audience with books (“AI: A guide for thinking humans”), columns (In Science and Quanta) and a widely read newsletter. She has been a voice of reason in the heated debates about the abilities and risks of Generative AI in recent years.

Program

• 15h05 introduction by Jelle Zuidema
• 15h08 main talk
• 15h55 questions and discussion
• 16h20 end of program

Live stream and recording: here

Abstract

AI’s Challenge of Understanding the World

I will survey a debate in the artificial intelligence (AI) research community on the extent to which current AI systems can be said to “understand” language and the physical and social situations language encodes. I will describe arguments that have been made for and against such understanding, hypothesize about what humanlike understanding entails, and discuss what methods can be used to fairly evaluate understanding and intelligence in AI systems.

Bio:

Melanie Mitchell is Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Her current research focuses on conceptual abstraction and analogy-making in artificial intelligence systems. Melanie is the author or editor of six books and numerous scholarly papers in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and complex systems. Her 2009 book Complexity: A Guided Tour (Oxford University Press) won the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award, and her 2019 book Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) was shortlisted for the 2023 Cosmos Prize for Scientific Writing.

About ALiAS

The Amsterdam Lectures in AI and Society are occasional lectures where prominent scholars and thinkers speak about the role of AI in Society. The lectures aim to bridge the divide between research in AI and research about AI, informed by both deep technological knowledge and a realistic appreciation of the impact this technology has and will have in society. The first ALiAS Lecture was presented by Prof Christopher Manning of Stanford University in 2023.