POSSIBLE MINDS: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI
With Editor JOHN BROCKMAN and local contributors:
CHRIS ANDERSON, ALISON GOPNIK,
STUART RUSSELL, and ANCA DRAGAN
Wednesday, February 27, 2018, 7:30pm
Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St., Berkeley
Tickets available now!
Berkeley Arts & Letters presents a panel discussion on the future of artificial intelligence and the nature of human existence.
Advances in artificial intelligence have forever altered the way we live -- from Alexa in your living room to autonomous vehicles and drone warfare -- and AI is poised to define the coming decades for better or worse. Tech giants, including Google and Facebook, are engaged in an AI arms race, while Elon Musk, the late Stephen Hawking, and other thought leaders have warned that unsupervised, self-improving machine learning poses a major threat to society. So where is AI headed next, and how will this rapidly emerging technology impact our world?
In Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI, science world luminary John Brockman has assembled twenty-five of the most important scientific thinkers to discuss the groundbreaking opportunities and potential dangers that AI presents. The result is an unparalleled round-table examination of the mind, thinking, intelligence, and what it means to be human.
Joining us for an evening of conversation are four Bay Area contributors:
- Chris Anderson: former EIC of Wired; cofounder and CEO of 3DRobotics.
- Alison Gopnik: developmental psychologist at UC Berkeley; Wall Street Journal columnist.
- Stuart Russell: computer scientist at UC Berkeley; drafted the letter from 40 leading AI researchers to President Obama that resulted in high-level national-security meetings.
- Anca Dragan: UC Berkeley professor; cofounder of the prestigious Berkeley AI Research Lab.
Leading the panel is Possible Minds editor John Brockman, founder of the powerhouse international literary and software agency Brockman, Inc. as well as the publisher of Edge.org, an online salon that the Guardian has called "the worlds smartest website."
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Please note:
Duration of event is subject to author's preference.
Signing and additional details coming soon.
This event is all ages. Accessibility is important to us! If you have special needs of any kind, please write events AT booksmith DOT com and we will do our best to accommodate you.
With Editor JOHN BROCKMAN and local contributors:
CHRIS ANDERSON, ALISON GOPNIK,
STUART RUSSELL, and ANCA DRAGAN
Wednesday, February 27, 2018, 7:30pm
Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St., Berkeley
Tickets available now!
Berkeley Arts & Letters presents a panel discussion on the future of artificial intelligence and the nature of human existence.
Advances in artificial intelligence have forever altered the way we live -- from Alexa in your living room to autonomous vehicles and drone warfare -- and AI is poised to define the coming decades for better or worse. Tech giants, including Google and Facebook, are engaged in an AI arms race, while Elon Musk, the late Stephen Hawking, and other thought leaders have warned that unsupervised, self-improving machine learning poses a major threat to society. So where is AI headed next, and how will this rapidly emerging technology impact our world?
In Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI, science world luminary John Brockman has assembled twenty-five of the most important scientific thinkers to discuss the groundbreaking opportunities and potential dangers that AI presents. The result is an unparalleled round-table examination of the mind, thinking, intelligence, and what it means to be human.
Joining us for an evening of conversation are four Bay Area contributors:
- Chris Anderson: former EIC of Wired; cofounder and CEO of 3DRobotics.
- Alison Gopnik: developmental psychologist at UC Berkeley; Wall Street Journal columnist.
- Stuart Russell: computer scientist at UC Berkeley; drafted the letter from 40 leading AI researchers to President Obama that resulted in high-level national-security meetings.
- Anca Dragan: UC Berkeley professor; cofounder of the prestigious Berkeley AI Research Lab.
Leading the panel is Possible Minds editor John Brockman, founder of the powerhouse international literary and software agency Brockman, Inc. as well as the publisher of Edge.org, an online salon that the Guardian has called "the worlds smartest website."
--
Please note:
Duration of event is subject to author's preference.
Signing and additional details coming soon.
This event is all ages. Accessibility is important to us! If you have special needs of any kind, please write events AT booksmith DOT com and we will do our best to accommodate you.
SIRI HUSTVEDT presents MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE
Wednesday, March 27, 2018, 7:30pm
Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St., Berkeley
Tickets available now!
Berkeley Arts & Letters presents international bestselling author of "The Blazing World" Siri Hustvedt for Memories of the Future, a provocative, exuberant novel about time, memory, desire, and the imagination that tells the story of a young Midwestern woman's first year in New York City in the late 1970s and her obsession with her mysterious neighbor, Lucy Brite.
As she listens to Lucy through the thin walls of her dilapidated building, S.H., aka Minnesota, transcribes her neighbors bizarre and increasingly ominous monologues in a notebook, along with sundry other adventures, until one frightening night when Lucy bursts into her apartment on a rescue mission.
Forty years later, S.H., now a veteran author, discovers her old notebook, as well as early drafts of a never-completed novel while moving her aging mother from one facility to another. Ingeniously juxtaposing the various texts, S.H. measures what she remembers against what she wrote that year and has since forgotten to create a dialogue between selves across decades. The encounter both collapses time and reframes its meanings in the present.
Elaborately structured, intellectually rigorous, urgently paced, poignant, and often wildly funny, "Memories of the Future" brings together themes that have made Hustvedt among the most celebrated novelists working today: the fallibility of memory; gender mutability; the violence of patriarchy; the vagaries of perception; the ambiguous borders between sensation and thought, sanity and madness; and our dependence on primal drives such as sex, love, hunger, and rage.
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Siri Hustvedt is the internationally acclaimed author of a book of poems, six novels, four collections of essays, and a work of nonfiction. In 2012 she was awarded the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities. Her novel "The Blazing World" was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Lost Angeles Book Prize for Fiction. She has also published numerous papers in scholarly and scientific journals. She has a PhD in English literature from Columbia University and is a Lecturer in Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Please note:
Duration of event is subject to author's preference.
Signing and additional details coming soon.
This event is all ages. Accessibility is important to us! If you have special needs of any kind, please write events AT booksmith DOT com and we will do our best to accommodate you.
Wednesday, March 27, 2018, 7:30pm
Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St., Berkeley
Tickets available now!
Berkeley Arts & Letters presents international bestselling author of "The Blazing World" Siri Hustvedt for Memories of the Future, a provocative, exuberant novel about time, memory, desire, and the imagination that tells the story of a young Midwestern woman's first year in New York City in the late 1970s and her obsession with her mysterious neighbor, Lucy Brite.
As she listens to Lucy through the thin walls of her dilapidated building, S.H., aka Minnesota, transcribes her neighbors bizarre and increasingly ominous monologues in a notebook, along with sundry other adventures, until one frightening night when Lucy bursts into her apartment on a rescue mission.
Forty years later, S.H., now a veteran author, discovers her old notebook, as well as early drafts of a never-completed novel while moving her aging mother from one facility to another. Ingeniously juxtaposing the various texts, S.H. measures what she remembers against what she wrote that year and has since forgotten to create a dialogue between selves across decades. The encounter both collapses time and reframes its meanings in the present.
Elaborately structured, intellectually rigorous, urgently paced, poignant, and often wildly funny, "Memories of the Future" brings together themes that have made Hustvedt among the most celebrated novelists working today: the fallibility of memory; gender mutability; the violence of patriarchy; the vagaries of perception; the ambiguous borders between sensation and thought, sanity and madness; and our dependence on primal drives such as sex, love, hunger, and rage.
--
Siri Hustvedt is the internationally acclaimed author of a book of poems, six novels, four collections of essays, and a work of nonfiction. In 2012 she was awarded the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities. Her novel "The Blazing World" was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Lost Angeles Book Prize for Fiction. She has also published numerous papers in scholarly and scientific journals. She has a PhD in English literature from Columbia University and is a Lecturer in Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Please note:
Duration of event is subject to author's preference.
Signing and additional details coming soon.
This event is all ages. Accessibility is important to us! If you have special needs of any kind, please write events AT booksmith DOT com and we will do our best to accommodate you.
NATHAN ENGLANDER presents KADDISH.COM
Tuesday, April 2, 2018, 7:30pm
Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St., Berkeley
Tickets available now!
Berkeley Arts & Letters presents Pulitzer finalist Nathan Englander for his best work yet: a brilliant, streamlined comic novel, reminiscent of early Philip Roth and of his own most masterful stories, about a son's failure to say Kaddish for his father.
Larry is an atheist in a family of orthodox Memphis Jews. When his father dies, it is his responsibility as the surviving son to recite the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, every day for eleven months. To the horror and dismay of his mother and sisters, Larry refuses – thus imperiling the fate of his father's soul. To appease them, and in penance for failing to mourn his father correctly, he hatches an ingenious if cynical plan, hiring a stranger through a website called kaddish.com to recite the daily prayer and shepherd his fathers soul safely to rest.
This is Nathan Englander's freshest and funniest work to date: a satire that touches, lightly and with unforgettable humor, on the conflict between religious and secular worlds, and the hypocrisies that run through both. A novel about atonement; about spiritual redemption; and about the soul-sickening temptations of the internet, which, like God, is everywhere.
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Nathan Englander is the author of the novels Dinner at the Center of the Earth and The Ministry of Special Cases, and the story collections For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His short fiction has been widely anthologized, most recently in 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories. His play The Twenty-Seventh Man premiered at The Public Theater in 2012. He also translated the New American Haggadah and co-translated Etgar Keret's Suddenly a Knock on the Door. He is Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at New York University and lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and daughter.
Please note:
Duration of event is subject to author's preference.
Signing and additional details coming soon.
This event is all ages. Accessibility is important to us! If you have special needs of any kind, please write events AT booksmith DOT com and we will do our best to accommodate you.
Tuesday, April 2, 2018, 7:30pm
Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St., Berkeley
Tickets available now!
Berkeley Arts & Letters presents Pulitzer finalist Nathan Englander for his best work yet: a brilliant, streamlined comic novel, reminiscent of early Philip Roth and of his own most masterful stories, about a son's failure to say Kaddish for his father.
Larry is an atheist in a family of orthodox Memphis Jews. When his father dies, it is his responsibility as the surviving son to recite the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, every day for eleven months. To the horror and dismay of his mother and sisters, Larry refuses – thus imperiling the fate of his father's soul. To appease them, and in penance for failing to mourn his father correctly, he hatches an ingenious if cynical plan, hiring a stranger through a website called kaddish.com to recite the daily prayer and shepherd his fathers soul safely to rest.
This is Nathan Englander's freshest and funniest work to date: a satire that touches, lightly and with unforgettable humor, on the conflict between religious and secular worlds, and the hypocrisies that run through both. A novel about atonement; about spiritual redemption; and about the soul-sickening temptations of the internet, which, like God, is everywhere.
--
Nathan Englander is the author of the novels Dinner at the Center of the Earth and The Ministry of Special Cases, and the story collections For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His short fiction has been widely anthologized, most recently in 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories. His play The Twenty-Seventh Man premiered at The Public Theater in 2012. He also translated the New American Haggadah and co-translated Etgar Keret's Suddenly a Knock on the Door. He is Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at New York University and lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and daughter.
Please note:
Duration of event is subject to author's preference.
Signing and additional details coming soon.
This event is all ages. Accessibility is important to us! If you have special needs of any kind, please write events AT booksmith DOT com and we will do our best to accommodate you.
Enjoy our event with Rebecca Solnit and Jeff Chang, courtesy of C-SPAN:
[The Mother of All Questions]
Rebecca Solnit examines how women have been silenced and the changes occurring within the feminist movement today. She speaks with with author Jeff Chang.