Welcome to the LSE events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.
Good evening, I'm Professor Jonathan Birch.
I'm Director of the Jeremy Collar Centre for Animal Sentience here at the LSE.
I'm a Professor of Philosophy and it's my pleasure to welcome you to this event.
Can We Talk to Animals?
An event part of the LSE's public lecture program
and part of the Philosophy Live series and supported by the Jeremy Collar Foundation.
It's become a cliche to say we live in an age of wonders.
But just think about today.
Today we've learned that AI has solved over 300 major mathematics problems.
These are problems that, several of which, had an individual mathematician solved them,
they would almost certainly have won the top prize in the field of mathematics.
Each of them was taking the AI, on average, three hours to solve.
This technology is not a normal technology.
It is going to be transformative for human civilization, for better or worse.
But when we think about the benefits
and the risks and these transformations caused by AI, we are nearly always talking about humans.
We nearly always forget that this technology is also transformative for every other species on the Earth as well.
And the risks are huge here, and the benefits potentially huge as well.