Artificial Intelligence, Real Consequences: AI's Impact on Labor, Money, Attention and Thought

Abstract

Compared to many fields, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has a relatively short history that dates back to the 1940's and 50's, with scattered breakthroughs during its first six or seven decades. However, AI progress now moves at a furious pace, and its influences upon the present state of technology, economics, education, and even politics are so powerful that it will probably have a chapter of its own in the histories of these and many other fields.

In this talk, Keith Downing will briefly examine the histories of four areas (work, finance, attention and human cognition) and discuss the role that AI has played in them so far and could possibly play in the future. Along the way, the hope is that listeners will realize that these histories all have very uncertain trajectories that we individuals can affect, if we can maintain a healthy relationship to an online world whose magnetism, carefully crafted by big tech, threatens to reduce human intelligence to something very artificial.

About the speaker

Professor Keith L. Downing is a leading AI researcher at NTNU whose work bridges Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, and Computational Neuroscience, with a particular focus on how intelligent behavior emerges in natural and artificial systems. His research—captured in his two MIT Press books Intelligence Emerging and Gradient Expectations—draws on deep learning, evolutionary computation, and bio‑inspired AI. A highly dedicated teacher, Downing has through decades contributed broadly to NTNU’s AI curriculum, and he is also widely recognized for his public outreach, giving talks that demystify AI technologies and highlight their societal implications. Professor Downing’s career spans more than half of the field of AI’s scientific lifetime, he is known for making complex ideas accessible and for asking the deep questions at the heart of intelligence—human and artificial.