Date/Time
Date(s) - 27 Oct 2026
6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
Location
Marston Exploration Theater, School of Earth and Space Exploration
The Nature of AI’s Intelligence
Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2026
6 p.m.
Marston Exploration Theater
781 S Terrace Road, Tempe, AZ 85281
Melanie Mitchell, PhD
James B. Alley Jr. Professor
Santa Fe Institute
REGISTER
Today’s AI systems are able to solve thorny problems in mathematics, computing, and many areas of science. At the same time, they are prone to hallucination, unhumanlike errors, intractable biases and exhibit a confounding “jaggedness” in their intelligence.
In this talk, Melanie Mitchell will describe how today’s state-of-the-art AI systems evolved from the earliest days of the field, how we can characterize their capabilities and trustworthiness and what certainties and uncertainties AI future holds.
Melanie Mitchell’s research is at the intersection between artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and complex systems. She has authored or edited six books and published over 100 scholarly papers in these fields. Her 2009 book Complexity: A Guided Tour won the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award, and her 2019 book Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans was named as one of the five best books on AI by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Among other honors, in 2025 she was the recipient of an Eric & Wendy Schmidt / National Academy of Sciences Top Award for Excellence in Science Communications.