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Pine Crest Upper School Hosts Artificial Intelligence Panel
March 16th 2023
The Pine Crest Upper School English department hosted a panel titled Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Our World.
The panel was moderated by Madison Huang ’23 and was composed of five professionals representing different areas of research and use, including two Pine Crest alumni.
The panelists, Dr. Ira Bedzow ’98, Director of The MirYam Institute Project in International Ethics & Leadership at Emory University; Dr. Sundararaman Gopalakrishnan, Senior Meteorologist and Modeling Team Lead for NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division; Asal Nouri, Brain Institute Fellow in the Graduate Neuroscience Training Program at Florida Atlantic University; Dr. Tobias Wilson-Bates, Assistant Professor of English at Georgia Gwinnett College; and Captain Michael Zequeira ’08, Test Officer for the United States Army Operational Test Command, addressed the entire Upper School before hosting smaller question-and-answer sessions in the afternoon and visiting specific classes.
“The idea for this assembly began with our shared summer reading text ‘Klara and the Sun’ by Kazuo Ishiguro,” said Mrs. Rebecca Strong, Upper School English teacher. “After our thought-provoking discussions of this novel, we thought it would fit with the future-ready aspect of Pine Crest’s mission to bring together some speakers extending the questions about artificial intelligence raised in the novel to the broader implications of this kind of technology to our present and future worlds. Little did we know, just a few months later, the rapidity of advances in AI technology would make the topic suddenly so immediately relevant to our everyday lives.”
Mrs. Strong continued, “We initially believed we would be discussing the ways that Ishiguro imagined a form of technology that seemed very far in the future, but having experienced the capabilities of programs like ChatGPT and Dall-E, for example, the possibility of conscious artificial intelligence impacting our lives the way it does in the book seems to be much more realistic than we thought. We know that artificial intelligence is here to stay, and, for all of us to be truly ready for the future, we must think carefully about how we will use this tool in an ethical and productive way.”
Students enjoyed the opportunity to consider applications and implications of AI that they might not have thought about before by hearing from experts who had different perspectives and from all walks of life. They also appreciated the chance to ask questions of experts in these fields who were approachable and interested in talking to them.
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