Harvard Law School. We alternately dread, worship and dismiss the arrival of Artificial Superintelligence (ASI). Yet the real superintelligences already surround us: religions, corporations, markets and democracies. This talk will welcome us to imagine not how we can build ASI that defeats us in all things, but instead how we can, together with our environment and machines, become a collectively self-aware global superintelligence. 

Using economic theory as a translational formalism, Weyl will illustrate how we can build core sociological ideas like community into algorithmic design and transform focal technical structures like neural networks into the design of social institutions. By transcending the misleading divide between social and technical systems, such joint engineering suggests a path away from both fear of ASI domination and its disappointing real-world performance.

Speaker

E. Glen Weyl is Founder and Research Lead at Microsoft Research’s Plural Technology Collaboratory, Co-Founder and Chair of the Plurality Institute, Co-Founder of RadicalxChange Foundation and Co-Founder of the Faith, Family and Technology Network. Weyl collaborates closely with leading technology figures like Audrey Tang, Jaron Lanier, and Vitalik Buterin. He co-authored the influential book Radical Markets, the widely-read paper "Decentralized Society” and the first democratically self-governed and fully open source book ⿻ 數位 Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy. Recognized as a leading thinker by WIRED and Bloomberg, Weyl graduated as Valedictorian from Princeton in 2007 and earned his PhD in economics from Princeton in 2008.