A look at the iconic Sather Gate at UC Berkeley. Series: "UC Landmarks" [Arts and Music] [Show ID: 40500]

This program aims to recover Plato’s idea of craft or art, Greek technê, in the expansive sense which includes not only the handicrafts but skilled practices from housebuilding to navigation. Rachel Barney, professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, examines Plato and other Greek thinkers who were fascinated by the craft model: the idea that both the moral virtue of the good person and the political widom of the expert ruler are — or could be made into — skilled practices as reliable as shoemaking or carpentry. Similar ideas appear in classical Chinese philosophy, developed in very different ways by Daoist and Confucian thinkers. In our time, craft is in a bad way: marginalized in theory and everywhere endangered in practice. Ancient thinkers can help us to see what remains valuable and urgent about craft today, and what a reinvigorated understanding of it might contribute to our ethical and political thought. Crafts to be considered include carpentry, medicine, drawing, film editing, the ‘multicraft’ of the restaurant, tennis, and traditional Polynesian navigation. Philosophical points of reference, in addition to Plato, Aristotle, Zhuangzi, and Xunzi, include Murdoch, MacIntyre, Korsgaard, and the Hart-Fuller debate, as well as literary reflections from Kazuo Ishiguro and Cormac McCarthy. Barney is joined by Adam Gopnik, Rachana Kamtekar, Christine Korsgaard, and Alexander Nehamas to discuss the topic of craft. Series: "Tanner Lectures on Human Values" [Humanities] [Business] [Show ID: 39865]

What is a craft? For Plato, paradigmatic craft-practitioners include the doctor, carpenter and navigator; an updated, more generous conception should include the dancer, coder, waitress, painter, chef, professional athlete, and firefighter. Rachel Barney, professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, discusses how each of these skilled practices is oriented to the achievement of a distinctive end, the goodness of which is independent of the self-interest or inclinations of the practitioner. This Platonic conception of craft as involving disinterested teleological rationality can explain how craft sets objective norms for correct action, and for the excellence of the practitioner. And it shows that to master a craft is not merely to acquire knowledge or skills but to take on the ‘internal standpoint’ definitive of the craft, internalizing its values and treating its reasons for action as authoritative. Barney is joined by Adam Gopnik and Rachana Kamtekar for commentary on the topic of craft. Series: "Tanner Lectures on Human Values" [Humanities] [Business] [Show ID: 39863]

Especially when practiced as a line of work — as a job or métier — craft sets norms for its practitioners. On the whole, a shoemaker should try to be a good shoemaker, and the good person who is a shoemaker routinely does just that. But what kind of ‘should’ is this, and what could connect these two kinds of goodness? Rachel Barney, professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, examines prominent philosophical conceptions of craft, ancient and modern, offer wildly various explanations of its normative authority. The picture is complicated by the way in which craft-as-work is paradigmatic both for successful practical reason and for social roles or practical identities in general. But the most fundamental source of craft’s normativity is the one which Plato and Aristotle bring out: the fact that, when practised as a job or métier, practicing your craft can be a way to realize the human good. And so thinking about craft turns out to be a way of thinking about Utopia: a society in which a just distribution of work could secure both the flourishing of the worker and the common good. Barney is joined by Christine Korsgaard and Alexander Nehamas for commentary on the topic of craft. Series: "Tanner Lectures on Human Values" [Humanities] [Business] [Show ID: 39864]

Young children’s learning may be an important model for artificial intelligence (AI). In this program, Alison Gopnik, professor of psychology and member of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab at UC Berkeley, says that comparing children and artificial agents in the same tasks and environments can help us understand the abilities of existing systems and create new ones. In particular, many current large data-supervised systems, such as large language models (LLMs), provide new ways to access information collected by past agents. However, they lack the kinds of exploration and innovation that are characteristic of children. New techniques may help to instantiate childlike curiosity, exploration and play in AI systems. This program is co-hosted with the UC Berkeley College of Computing, Data Science, and Society and the UC Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab. About the Series: CITRIS Research Exchange delivers fresh perspectives on information technology and society from distinguished academic, industry and civic leaders. Free and open to the public, these seminars feature leading voices on societal-scale research issues. Series: "Data Science Channel" [Science] [Show ID: 39351]

Researchers used to define objectives for artificial intelligence (AI) agents by hand, but with progress in optimization and reinforcement learning, it became obvious that it's too difficult to think of everything ahead of time and write it down. Instead, these days the objective is viewed as a hidden part of the state on which researchers can receive feedback or observations from humans — how they act and react, how they compare options, what they say. In this talk, Anca Dragan, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley, discusses what this transition has achieved, what open challenges researchers still face and ideas for mitigating them. Dragan discusses applications in robotics and how the lessons there apply to virtual agents like large language models. Series: "Data Science Channel" [Science] [Show ID: 39350]

After founding four companies and working at top firms in venture capital and private equity, where fast growth and maximum profits rule, David Whorton, Founder and CEO of the Tugboat Institute, has spent the last decade exploring and developing the concept of the evergreen company—one built to last privately over 100 years. The evergreen company stands in contrast to those that are being built to flip to generate wealth for a small few. Instead, evergreen companies are being built with very long planning horizons and the commitment to share their success with their employees and their communities. Whorton argues evergreen companies are incredibly important to our society, but overlooked and under-appreciated relative to venture capitalists, private equity and public companies that represent the de facto growth company models. Since the dot.com boom, the de facto growth model for venture capitalists has been get-big-fast. It later evolved to growth-at-all-costs with the advent of cheap money under loose Fed policies. This play book led to numerous excesses, including the manic pursuit of ever larger and higher valuation rounds in hot companies. In the same period, private equity has risen dramatically, unwisely seen by many as a safer asset class than public stocks; an industry sits on over a trillion dollars of dry powder to invest, matched with a couple trillion of debt, giving the private equity firms purchasing power over $3 trillion dollars. Series: "Tanner Lectures on Human Values" [Business] [Show ID: 39235]

In this program, Jaron Lanier, Microsoft's prime unifying scientist, discusses a piece he published in The New Yorker (“There Is No AI”) about applying data dignity ideas to artificial intelligence. Lanier argues that large-model AI can be reconceived as a social collaboration by the people who provide data to the model in the form of text, images and other modalities. This is a figure/ground inversion of the usual conception of AI as being a participant or collaborator in its own right. Explanations of model results and behaviors would then center around the relative influence of specific inputs through a provenance calculation mechanism. This formulation suggests new and different strategies for long-term economics in the context of high-performance AI, as well as more concrete approaches to many safety, fairness and alignment questions. This program is co-hosted with the UC Berkeley College of Computing, Data Science, and Society and the UC Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab. The CITRIS Research Exchange delivers fresh perspectives on information technology and society from distinguished academic, industry and civic leaders. Series: "Data Science Channel" [Science] [Show ID: 39326]

Researchers deployed a fleet of 100 semi-autonomous vehicles to test whether a new AI-powered cruise control system can help smooth the flow of traffic and improve fuel economy. In a massive traffic experiment, scientists tested whether introducing just a few AI-equipped vehicles to the road can help ease “phantom” jams caused by human behavior and reduce fuel consumption for everyone. (Video: Roxanne Makasdjian, Alan Toth, and CIRCLES Consortium Music: Dyalla - Organic Guitar House) Series: "UC Berkeley News" [Public Affairs] [Science] [Show ID: 39225]

Using real-life examples and historical evidence, French anthropologist Philippe Descola aims to understand the unique characteristics of communities that exist outside of modern societies. These communities have often been misunderstood because they were mistakenly compared to nation-states. However, Descola argues that we should examine the components and relationships within these communities based on how they perceive the world. By doing so, we can challenge the Eurocentric and human-centric view of social structures, which rely on Western ideas of progress and functionality. Series: "Tanner Lectures on Human Values" [Humanities] [Show ID: 38617]

In this program, scholars Philippe Descola, Adom Getachew, Timothy LeCain and David Wengrow discuss how views of humans verses non-humans shaped the modern world. Series: "Tanner Lectures on Human Values" [Humanities] [Show ID: 38618]

This series on artificial intelligence explores recent breakthroughs of AI, its broader societal implications and its future potential. In this presentation, Pamela Samuelson, professor of Law and Information at UC Berkeley, discusses whether computer-generated texts and images fall under the copyright law. She says that early on, the consensus was that AI was just a tool, like a camera, so humans could claim copyright in machine-generated outputs to which they made contributions. Now the consensus is that AI-generated texts and images are not copyrightable for the lack of a human author. The urgent questions today focus on whether ingesting in-copyright works as training data is copyright infringement and whether the outputs of AI programs are infringing derivative works of the ingested images. Four recent lawsuits, one involving GitHub’s Copilot and three involving Stable Diffusion, will address these issues. Samuelson has been a member of the UC Berkeley School of Law faculty since 1996. She has written and spoken extensively about the challenges that new information technologies pose for traditional legal regimes, especially for intellectual property law. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a contributing editor of Communications of the ACM, a past fellow of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, a member of the American Law Institute, and an honorary professor of the University of Amsterdam. Series: "Data Science Channel" [Science] [Business] [Show ID: 38859]

This series on artificial intelligence explores recent breakthroughs of AI, its broader societal implications and its future potential. In this presentation, Sergey Levine, associate professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley, discusses AI reinforcement learning methods. Levine asks what it would take to create machine learning systems that can make decisions when faced with the full complexity and diversity of the real world, while still retaining the ability of reinforcement learning to come up with new solutions? He discusses how advances in offline reinforcement learning can enable machine learning systems to learn to make more optimal decisions from data, combining the best of data-driven machine learning with the capacity for emergent behavior and optimization provided by reinforcement learning. Levine received a BS and MS in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2009, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2014. He joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley in fall 2016. His work focuses on machine learning for decision making and control, with an emphasis on deep learning and reinforcement learning algorithms. Applications of his work include autonomous robots and vehicles, as well as applications in other decision-making domains. His research includes developing algorithms for end-to-end training of deep neural network policies that combine perception and control, scalable algorithms for inverse reinforcement learning, deep reinforcement learning algorithms, and more. Series: "Data Science Channel" [Science] [Show ID: 38857]

This series on artificial intelligence explores recent breakthroughs of AI, its broader societal implications and its future potential. In this presentation, Stuart Russell, professor of computer science at the UC, Berkeley, discusses what AI is and how it could be beneficial to civilization. Russell is a leading researcher in artificial intelligence and the author, with Peter Norvig, of “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach,” the standard text in the field. His latest book, “Human Compatible,” addresses the long-term impact of AI on humanity. He is also an honorary fellow of Wadham College at the University of Oxford. Series: "Data Science Channel" [Science] [Show ID: 38856]

This series on artificial intelligence explores recent breakthroughs of AI, its broader societal implications and its future potential. In this presentation, Michael Jordan, professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Statistics at UC Berkeley, discusses the how to connect research in economics with computer science and statistics, with a long-term goal of providing a broader conceptual foundation for emerging real-world AI systems, and to upend received wisdom in the computational, economic and inferential disciplines. Jordan argues that AI has focused on a paradigm in which intelligence inheres in a single agent, and in which agents should be autonomous so they can exhibit intelligence independent of human intelligence. Thus, when AI systems are deployed in social contexts, the overall design is often naive. Such a paradigm need not be dominant. In a broader framing, agents are active and cooperative, and they wish to obtain value from participation in learning-based systems. Agents may supply data and resources to the system, only if it is in their interest. Critically, intelligence inheres as much in the system as it does in individual agents. Jordan's research interests bridge the computational, statistical, cognitive, biological and social sciences. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a foreign member of the Royal Society. He was a plenary lecturer at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2018. He received the Ulf Grenander Prize from the American Mathematical Society in 2021, the IEEE John von Neumann Medal in 2020, the IJCAI Research Excellence Award in 2016, the David E. Rumelhart Prize from the Cognitive Science Society in 2015 and the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award in 2009. Series: "Data Science Channel" [Science] [Business] [Show ID: 38858]

French anthropologist Philippe Descola examines the evolution of modern thinking about societies. He argues that the rooting of the descriptive tools of the social sciences in Enlightenment philosophy has blinded us to the fact that what are loosely called ‘societies’ are in fact, for extra-moderns, assemblages that, unlike ours, contain and associate much more than just humans, either because their institutions are able to integrate other-than-humans into collectives, or because other-than-humans are seen as political subjects acting within their own collectives. In other words, the kinds of beings that result from these assemblages are not those to which philosophy or the social sciences usually pay attention: they are associations of humans and other-than-humans that take very diverse forms and, in this sense, can also offer food for thought about the much-needed transformation of the political and social institutions proper to the Moderns. We could call these assemblages cosmopolities in that they bring under the same regime of cosmic sociability a vast set of components that the ontology of the Moderns has tended to dissociate. Series: "Tanner Lectures on Human Values" [Humanities] [Show ID: 38616]

It has become commonplace that democracy in the United States faces an existential threat. This belief has gained popular currency in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency, nourished by his conduct in office, the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, and continuing efforts to subvert the electoral process. Whether this is true only time will tell. But a common narrative among scholars of American government holds that representative democracy is failing more systematically than the Trump phenomenon suggests. In this program, Charles Beitz, professor of politics at Princeton University, along with commentary by Martin Gilens, Pamela S. Karlan and Jane Mansbridge, talk about the current state of democratic dysfunction and what the future might hold. Series: "Tanner Lectures on Human Values" [Public Affairs] [Show ID: 38274]

It has become commonplace that democracy in the United States faces an existential threat. This belief has gained popular currency in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency, nourished by his conduct in office, the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, and continuing efforts to subvert the electoral process. Whether this is true only time will tell. But a common narrative among scholars of American government holds that representative democracy is failing more systematically than the Trump phenomenon suggests. In this program, Charles Beitz, professor of politics at Princeton University, along with commentary by Pamela S. Karlan and Jane Mansbridge, talk about how to regulate rivalry in democratic representative government. Series: "Tanner Lectures on Human Values" [Public Affairs] [Show ID: 38273]

It has become commonplace that democracy in the United States faces an existential threat. This belief has gained popular currency in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency, nourished by his conduct in office, the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, and continuing efforts to subvert the electoral process. Whether this is true only time will tell. But a common narrative among scholars of American government holds that representative democracy is failing more systematically than the Trump phenomenon suggests. In this program, Charles Beitz, professor of politics at Princeton University, and Martin Gilens, professor of public policy at UCLA, address how to diagnose the problem of whether or not our system of government is failing. Series: "Tanner Lectures on Human Values" [Public Affairs] [Show ID: 38272]

Ukrainian Member of Parliament Inna Sovsun joins Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, and Janet Napolitano, Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy and former Secretary of Homeland Security, for a firsthand perspective on the war in Ukraine since the Russian invasion in early 2022. They discuss the war's impact, and what comes next for the people of Ukraine. This event is cosponsored by the Goldman School of Public Policy, the Center for Security in Politics, the Center for Studies in Higher Education, the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, the Institute of European Studies Series: "The Goldman School - Berkeley Public Policy" [Public Affairs] [Show ID: 38606]