Open Tech Calendar

Monthly Talk format with Q&A. FREE ENTRY. Room open from 7:25. Voluntary donations are welcome to help cover costs.

Tom Chivers - The AI Does Not Hate You: How much should we worry about an AI apocalypse?

Fears around "superintelligence" and the AI apocalypse usually bring up pictures of the Terminator, and Skynet rebelling when it achieves consciousness. But a group of people worry that the truth is both more prosaic and more frightening: that a superintelligent machine will do exactly what we ask of it, but in doing so will kill us all. In my book – and in this talk – I look at whether their worries are worth paying attention to.

Tom is a science writer. He worked for seven years for the Telegraph and three for BuzzFeed UK before going freelance in 2017. He has won several awards for his writing, including a Statistical Excellence in Journalism prize from the Royal Statistical Society, and was nominated for Best Science Journalism at the British Journalism Awards 2017. Terry Pratchett once told him that he was ""too nice to be a journalist"", but he has struggled on regardless.

His debut book, The AI Does Not Hate You: Superintellligence, Rationality, and the Race to Save the World, is due to be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in June 2019.