Professor Thomas Sargent, Nobel Prize (2011) presents: Sources of Artificial Intelligence

Professor Thomas J. Sargent will present the first Goldsmith lecture for 2023. The lecture is funded through the Goldsmith Economic Research Endowment.

Professor Simon Grant from the ANU Research School of Economics will moderate the session.

About the lecture

This lecture is about human and artificial intelligence and learning. Tom takes 'artificial' to mean 'non- human'.

Before describing artificial intelligence and machine learning, Tom will state his understanding of what natural or human intelligence is by describing salient classes of activities that a combination of innate and learned skills enable intelligent people to perform: recognising patterns and making choices. Other aspects of intelligence are awareness of time and space, and also sympathy and empathy with other people. Successive generations of parents pass on to their children tools and perspectives that their parents taught them, as well as new ideas that they have learned.

After describing how Galileo and Darwin combined their innate talents with their text-book knowledge to create scientific breakthroughs, Tom will tell how modern researchers have designed computer programs that can recognise patterns and make choices.

About the presenter

Professor Thomas J. Sargent

Thomas J. Sargent is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a leader in the field of macroeconomics. He is the William R. Berkley Professor of Economics and Business at New York University and the Donald L. Lucas Professor in Economics, Emeritus, at Stanford University. He received the Nobel Prize in economic sciences in 2011.

A professor of economics at the University of Minnesota from 1975 to 1987, when he joined the Hoover staff, he was also the David Rockefeller Professor at the University of Chicago from 1992 to 1998. Tom is past president of the Econometric Society, the American Economic Association, and the Society for Economic Dynamics.

Tom was awarded the University Medal as the outstanding scholar in the Class of 1964 and won the Nemmers Prize in Economics in 1997. He was elected a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, both in 1983.

Among his books are Rational Expectations and Econometric Practice with Robert E. Lucas Jr. (University of Minnesota Press, 1981); The Big Problem of Small Change with Francois Velde (Princeton University Press, 2002); Recursive Macroeconomic Theory with Lars Ljungqvist (MIT Press, 2004); and Robustness, with Lars Peter Hansen Princeton (University Press, 2007).

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