Leland Library Summinars: A.I., Ethics, Apocalypse? with Paul Gregory

Generative AI's rapid advancement presents transformative potential as well as critical ethical challenges for education, medicine, the environment, and our personal lives. We will explore the benefits and risks of current AI models and their deployment in different sectors of our lives. We will consider the possibility of genuinely intelligent, thinking artificial intelligences, the possibility of an AI Apocalypse, and what form that might take.

PAUL GREGORY is Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy at Washington and Lee University. He joined the department in 2002. His teaching and research focus on philosophy of mind, language, logic, epistemology, metaphysics, and the history of analytic philosophy, especially the work of W.V. Quine. His book Quine’s Naturalism was published by Continuum, and Formal Logic, his textbook on symbolic logic, is published by Broadview Press. He teaches courses in logic, philosophy of mind and language, and special topics on cyborgs, human enhancement, and transhumanism. Gregory holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a B.A. from Syracuse University.