Distinguished Lecture: Justine Cassell

Title: AI and the Future of Social Interaction

Lecture abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has implications for almost every aspect of our lives. However, the fears that it has evoked sometimes seem to outweigh the possibilities. Fears about the future of work and the future of social interaction seem to weigh most heavily, and these fears have intensified with the advent of large language models (LLM) and chatbots such as ChatGPT that promise conversation on demand and artificial companionship. However these systems continue to ignore key aspects of how language functions to build bonds, and how social bonds function to improve performance on a broad variety of tasks. This talk will describe some unexpected results about the ways in which social interaction supports and improves task performance in people, and how those results can be used to improve AI systems, with implications for the future of AI, the future of work, and the future of social interaction.

Speaker's bio

Justine Cassell is jointly appointed as Dean's Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and Senior Researcher at Inria Paris, where she also holds a chair in Artificial Intelligence in the PRAIRIE institute. Cassell came to CMU in 2010 to lead the department of Human-Computer Interaction. Previously she was faculty at Northwestern University where she founded the Technology and Social Behavior Doctoral Program and Research Center, and before that she was a tenured professor at the MIT Media Lab. Cassell has received the MIT Edgerton Prize, Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision award, the AAMAS Test of Time paper award, and the National Academy of Sciences Henry and Bryna David Prize. She is a member of the Strategic Intelligence Impact Circle, a think tank for the World Economic Forum, where she previously chaired the council on Ai and robotics and the council on the future of computing. Cassell is a fellow of the AAAS, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and the ACM. Justine has consulted for governments around the world as they develop policies about the use of AI technologies, and she is a co-founder of EqualAI, a non-profit working on reducing bias in AI by leading the movement for innovative, responsible, and inclusive artificial intelligence.