☰
Home
Sponsors
Organizers
AI agents powered by individuals' data are reshaping everyday interactions on social platforms and marketplaces. At a planetary scale, the aggregation of multi-modal data enables transformative applications, such as mental health support through AI-driven tools, such as chatbots that connect individuals to their future selves and help mitigate depressive moods. However, these advancements also bring systemic risks, including biases, misinformation, and threats to democratic institutions. This talk explores how thoughtful design in database systems and AI can mitigate these challenges, foster sustainable development, and uphold human-centered values. It further advocates for the vigilant oversight of societal-scale AI applications to prevent dual-use and other ethical concerns and instead promote the benefit for humanity.
What separates life from artificial intelligence (AI) is not simply biology or carbon, but the presence of internal purpose, embodied value systems, and self-referentiality. In this talk, I will explore the nuanced and often overlooked gap between living organisms and intelligent machines. Drawing from affective neuroscience, cybernetics, and biology, I trace how living organisms emerge as special-purpose systems with non-trivial dynamics, guided not just by external goals but by intrinsic motivations and self-referential processes. This distinctiveness of life forms a unique “interface” between living systems and AI. Understanding and designing for this interface requires rethinking what it means to survive, to feel, and to construct an internal model. At the edge of life and AI, we can begin to ask not only how AI might imitate life, but how our interfaces with AI can remain grounded in the reality of being alive.
