AI is all around us—recognizing faces in photos, transcribing speech, answering questions, writing essays, generating code, and much more. But rapidly improving AI is poised to play a much bigger role in all of our lives.

In this lecture, Melanie Mitchell, a complexity scientist at the Santa Fe Institute and a highly regarded expert in artificial intelligence, will describe how contemporary AI works, how “intelligent” it really is, and what our expectations—and concerns—about its near-term and long-term prospects should be.

Mitchell is the author or editor of six books and numerous scholarly papers in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and complex systems. Among many awards for her research and writing, Mitchell’s 2009 book Complexity: A Guided Tour won the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award and her 2019 book Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans was named as one of the five best books on AI by both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.