Hello. — I'm Henry Garner CTO & AI Chapter Lead

AI research has always had two goals: building systems that replace human judgment (AI), and building systems that extend it. William Ross Ashby called the second one Intelligence Amplification (IA) back in 1956. We're fixated on the first, but the commercial successes keep coming from the second.

Aristotle had a word for the judgment we need to preserve: phronesis, practical wisdom. This talk draws on medicine and ethics to ask how we hold onto it. When AI suggests solutions, do we evaluate them thoughtfully, or do we gradually lose the situational awareness needed for proper oversight?

Filing cabinets and lightbulbs aren't the obvious route into software engineering. Inspired by the Quantum Untangled exhibition at the Science Gallery London, this talk traces an unconventional path into the industry through the Big Ideas of David Deutsch and the philosophy of good explanations.

Why do we see such polarisation between those who wield AI despite its flaws and those who are fervently anti-AI despite its extraordinary successes? Human progress is full of incredibly useful models that turned out to be absolutely wrong. We didn't know that reading glasses would lead to Galileo's telescopes, or that telephone valve amplifiers would enable the first electronic computers. We simply can't know where the next stepping stones will come from.