AI Is Here. How Can We Help All the Humans? Answer: Math, With a Twist.

PIMS welcomes Professor Po-Shen Loh to UBC on November 9th for a FREE talk titled "AI is Here. How Can We Help All the Humans? Answer: Math, With a Twist".

Researchers and companies are racing to be the first to create Artificial General Intelligence, which explicitly intends to broadly surpass human intelligence. Every few months, there are new reports of AI being able to perform more and more sophisticated tasks, even reaching the breakthrough of solving International Math Olympiad problems.

What then, will become of people? It is now urgent to rapidly uplift human intelligence, as well as to unite humanity in a collaborative spirit, for the survival of the human race.

Professor Po-Shen Loh brings a unique background that bridges all of these worlds. He is on a mission to build a more thoughtful human world. He served as the national coach of the USA International Math Olympiad team for a decade, but also regularly interacts with students from underprivileged schools with low exam scores. He is also a math professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and a social entrepreneur and serial inventor, with a firsthand understanding of business, technology, employment, and scale. His innovations combine fields from math to the performing arts.

In this talk, Professor Loh will share some of his recent work, which uses the perspective of game theory to align human incentives in a novel way. Math is deeply embedded throughout the strategy. He invented new win-win ecosystems that facilitate mass-scale education of problem-solving (how to invent new solutions to previously-unseen problem types, which differs strongly from standardized exams), while concurrently creating a social fabric of trusted and thoroughly human relationships that incentivize high-skill people to contribute their skills to others, rather than selfishly accumulating resources. He will also share his personal journey which helped him accumulate these insights about human incentives: by embarking on the highest-density public speaking tour ever conducted by a professor (https://poshenloh.com/tour).

This work has previously been covered in CNN (https://cnn.com/world/professor-po-shen-loh-actors-classrooms-spc) and the Wall Street Journal (https://www.wsj.com/articles/chatgpt-ai-math-po-shen-loh-1e9f80dc?st=9HjTR3&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink).

This talk is designed for parents and educators who have students of all ages (from primary school to university). Students themselves are welcome to attend if they wish, but since the topic focuses on big-picture societal strategy, it will be most understandable to high school students and higher.

The talk will also contain practical advice for parents and educators to help their students love and build the creative problem-solving skills which will be crucial to success in a post-AI world.