As a follow up to our CIO Forum event on Thursday, June 15, 2023, we would like to give special thanks to our speaker, Marc Donner, Co-Host of Mind the Gap: Dialogs on Artificial Intelligence, for his innovative discussion on “AI/ChatGPT-Help! Hype vs Reality”. It was great seeing all of you who joined us before our summer break!
Thank you for all your great questions, passion, and participation! Below are key takeaways from the meeting. Looking forward to seeing you all at our next event.
Marc Donner is an independent NYC-based computer scientist and systems engineer with a long history in distributed computing and artificial intelligence. He calls himself a recovering academic and has been fascinated with AI since earning a PhD in it in the 1980s.
Key Takeaways:
Marc took us through the history of AI from its origins to the present. He noted that neural net technology, which is big in AI today, was largely ignored in the from the 1960s until relatively recently.
According to Marc, robots and AI are often portrayed in popular fiction as evil. The word “robot” comes from a Czech word meaning slave labor.
Marc calls Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics the first attempt at the governance of AI.
Marc talked about language translation as an AI challenge. According to Marc a major breakthrough occurred using statistics and two golden copies of the same body of text in two languages. This was tested with the proceedings of the Canadian Parliament, which by law must be produced in English and French. Marc considers language translation to be a solved problem. While it can be improved, the fundamental outline is complete.
Marc spoke about who should govern AI. He argues that letting industry alone govern AI is a dangerous position. He considers the ideal position to be governance by industry, government, and people that AI applications affect.
Marc noted that generative models appear to be doing what humans do, but it’s important to note that they are not. He warned us that models trained with historical data will reproduce any bias and prejudice that the people who made the original decisions labored under.
Wishing you a relaxing and safe summer!
All the best!
-malka
Malka Treuhaft
Executive Director East Coast CIO Forum &
President
Truision Inc.
646.942.2625 (office)
917.589.1069 (mobile)
718.375.1529 (fax)
www.truision.com
Marc Donner’s Bio
Marc Donner was born in a log cabin on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the waning half of the twentieth century. After high school he went west where he earned a BS at Caltech. After some time working at NASA and IBM Research he made his way to CMU where he earned a PhD in computer science working on Ivan Sutherland’s six-legged walking robot. After his PhD he worked at IBM Research on robotics and distributed computing. The distributed computing work took him to Wall Street where he built large-scale systems and economic models, among other things. After Wall Street he went to Google where he rebuilt Google Health and worked on software for very large scale networks. After Google he led Uber’s NYC engineering office. Marc now calls himself a recovering academic. He consults in high-tech, medical informatics, cybersecurity, software engineering, and general curmudgeonliness from his company, NYGeek LLC. Whether he is between jobs or is retired, “depends on whether,” as Ivan once said, “I take another job or die first.”
