You can now watch the 2023 COSM Technology Summit on YouTube. If you weren’t able to attend, or perhaps you want to revisit some of your favorite speakers, we are now releasing the second tranche of videos for your enjoyment.

Click here to go to the COSM 2023 Playlist on YouTube!

COSM 2023 explored the nature of artificial intelligence, as well as its future potential and risks.

Stephen Wolfram spoke about his efforts to make the world more computable so that computers can help us understand the world. Afterward, George Gilder and Bob Metcalfe joined him in a fascinating discussion about Turing machines, neural networks, and AI-driven language models.

A panel featuring William Dembski, Robert Marks, and George Montanez offered three different views on the limits and possibilities of AI versus that of the human mind. George Montanez, Professor of Computer Science at Harvey Mudd College, offered his view that artificial intelligence does not — and may never! — surpass the capabilities of the human mind:

“If you trapped ChatGPT in its own silicone room and you told it to just produce outputs and you trained it on its own outputs, it would very quickly devolve. So whatever it is that these systems are doing, it’s different from what we are bringing to the table as humans. As systems, they’re impressive — vastly impressive — but they’re not quite there yet in terms of rationality or consciousness. Will it ever get there?”

In a talk titled “AI for Good: Using AI to Address Complex Global Challenges,” Juan Lavista Ferres and Babak Parviz discussed the many ways in which AI can improve the world — from decreasing infant mortality to improving our health care to providing more accurate disaster assessments.

AI futurist Ray Kurzweil offered one of the conference’s boldest assessments of what the near-term future holds for AI capabilities:

“AI is exactly where it should be right now to achieve human-level intelligence by 2029. . . .Once AI reaches human-level capability, it will at the same time soar past us in every way. . . .We’re not going to be left behind. We’re going to merge with the technology that we’re creating and move forward into the future together.”

You can also watch backstage interviews, in which Senior Fellow Jay Richards goes into greater depth with each speaker on the topics addressed onstage.

Click here to go to the COSM 2023 Playlist on YouTube.

We are excited to release these for you. Keep your eyes peeled for more videos to come!

Please save the date for COSM 2024: October 31-November 1 in Bellevue, Washington! 

COSM is an exclusive national summit on the converging technologies remaking the world as we know it. The mission of the conference is to stimulate debate and deliberation amongst industry leaders on the unities animating these apparently divergent technology areas. Held at the Bellevue Hyatt, the summit illuminates the synergy between Seattle and the world and provides a scene of civilized conversation and exchange.

COSM 2024 will be the TOPOCOSM: exploring the new science of technology, the theory of spaces and places, and the technological transformation it is ushering in to a mostly baffled and indifferent world.