David Hanson is a advanced Robotics Expert,
Founder & Chief Creative Officer at Hanson Robotics
Speaking topics
› Why We Need AI with Heart
› The Ethics and Diversity of Creativity in AI and Robotics
Abstracts
How the future of creative practice looks like? How can machine learning change the type of creative work that people can make? How using machine learning can help creative experts engaging in creative work? Can we creatively democratize AI, and make the field inclusive of all people and disciplines? And finally how can we stem the dangers than unethical creativity may present?
David Hanson will talk whether designing AI can increase abundance and solve problems, and finding our way peaceably past all the struggles and hardship, to a sustainable future of creativity. It will be two opposite perspectives at integrative platforms that facilitate human creativity, combining the best perception, dialogue, and social robotics tools that we can develop.
Over the next few years we will see AI and robots (as the physical interface of AI) radically change the economic and societal landscape. Recent AI has begun to revolutionize healthcare, fintech, financial markets, and even write news articles and create hot new artworks. All the key trends in AI are accelerating, from computing, to algorithms, computational biology, to market adoption. The revolution has barely begun. We are just now seeing glimmers of the most profound trends towards generalizing AI, and bio-inspired algorithms that are adaptive and self-reprogramming. What are the implications for people in this turbulent time where AI can convolutions of truth and human relationships? Will future AI enhance or harm us? Will they even care? I assert that only by Humanizing the machines, both in form and function, can we raise our AI to understand and care about us, and thereby harmonize with human life. Such efforts must grow beyond an engineering quest, with greater diversify of creative efforts, bringing together arts and humanities, with philosophy and ethics, together with bioscience and AI. By creating machines that reflect and emulate life, we may engage both human and machine creative imagination, to better explore what it means to be human, and decide who we want to be as we voyage into our future. Such machines would then become our friends and partners, our trusted allies, not just slaves. Only by humanizing our machines can we build a stable world with a place for the growing benefit of humans and all sentient beings.
Bio note
David Hanson develops robots that are widely regarded as the world’s most human-like in appearance, in a lifelong quest to create true living, caring machines. To accomplish these goals, Hanson integrates figurative arts with cognitive science and robotics engineering, inventions novel skin materials, facial expression mechanisms, and collaborative developments in AI, within humanoid artworks like Sophia the robot, which can engage people in naturalistic face-to-face conversations and currently serve in AI research, education, therapy, and other uses. Hanson worked as a Walt Disney Imagineer, both a sculptor and a technical consultant in robotics, and later founded Hanson Robotics. As a researcher, David Hanson published dozens of papers in materials science, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and robotics journals — including SPIE, IEEE, the International Journal of Cognitive Science, IROS, AAAI, AI magazine and more. David Hanson wrote two books including “Humanizing Robots” and received several patents. Hanson was featured in the New York Times, Popular Science, Scientific American, WIRED, BBC and CNN. He also received earned awards from NASA, NSF, Tech Titans’ Innovator of the Year, RISD, Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial, and the co-received the 2005 AAAI first place prize for open interaction of an AI system. Hanson holds a Ph.D. in Interactive Arts and Technology from the University of Texas at Dallas, and a BFA in lm Animation video from the Rhode Island School of Design.
