Prof Tommie Meyer (right) with his friend and mentor Norman Foo (left)
Tommie Meyer has his finger on the pulse of Artificial Intelligence
“THE ONLY WAY IN WHICH WE CAN ENSURE THAT HUMANS WILL TRUST THE DECISIONS MADE BY MACHINES IS IF MACHINES CAN EXPLAIN THEIR DECISIONS TO US, AND THOSE EXPLANATIONS ARE ACCEPTABLE TO US.”
Little known facts about Tommie Meyer • Greatest lesson learned : People generally mean well, even though it may not always look that way. • Biggest mistake made : Not continuing with piano lessons beyond primary school level. Self-confessed main claim to fame : A brief, uncredited appearance of about three seconds in the Academy Award winning movie Sugar Man when a photograph of him at one of the Voëlvry concerts in the late 1980s is flashed onto the screen. “I attended almost every Voëlvry concert that was held in the late eighties. I was a bit of a groupie back then.”
The way in which humans reason and draw conclusions by using the knowledge they have available to them has fascinated Prof Tommie Meyer since his high school days. He elaborates:
best in us. His guess is neither, says Meyer: AI has the potential to bring out the best in us, but I am enough of a pessimist to predict that we’ll not always use AI for good. Similarly, AI has the potential to destroy us. But I’m enough of an optimist to guess that we’ll do the sensible thing and put measures in place to curb the excesses of AI. AI has become embedded in our daily lives almost without us even being aware of it, like most disruptive technologies. While there is a lot of excitement about the current advances in AI, many AI technologies have been around for a long time. As a simple example, the fact that you are able to get a stable signal on your cell
I came across the writings and books of the logician
and mathematician Raymond Smullyan and found them to be a wonderful introduction to how logic can be used to represent reasoning processes. This was my first introduction to artificial intelligence (AI), although I was not aware of the term at the time. Whenever people find out that he works in AI they invariably want to know whether AI is going to destroy humanity or bring out the
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