Sunday, September 27, 2026 · 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM
Underwood History Room - 232 — 336 Concord Ave., Belmont, MA
In "How to Survive the Era of AI," Reza Rawassizadeh argues that AI is not a revolution in its own right but an evolution within the digital revolution, tracing its roots from early semiconductor pioneers and the transistor through AlexNet in 2012, CNNs, RNNs, GANs, and the 2017 transformer architecture that enabled ChatGPT. He dismisses fears of AGI as unfounded, since computers cannot escape their formal systems, and instead points to real dangers AI already poses: aggressive data harvesting, mass surveillance, flawed machine decisions, the heavy environmental cost of data centers, job losses, and disinformation. He's proposed some resolutions, including keep learning broadly across many tools rather than specializing narrowly, limit and diversify media consumption while staying skeptical of mass media and big tech marketing, refuse to feed personal data to corporate monopolies by favoring open source tools and reducing social media use, and build small projects, ideally in the lower layers of the AI stack where job security is greater. --- Professor Reza Rawassizadeh holds a Ph. D. of Computer Science from University of Vienna, a Master’s degree from the Vienna University of…