Joanna Bryson

"I enjoy sports, although I’m not good at any. I’m not one of those people who just says they’re bad, I really am uncoordinated, but for some reason I enjoy things anyway. At MIT I played soccer with The Cold Booters (I founded their C-league team) and D-league ice hockey with the Halting Problem in 1995 & 2000 (I got to play D league 2 years because I never learned to skate). In Edinburgh I managed to find 3 different weekly bad soccer games. When I first came to Bath, sometimes the Math & CS grad students let me play football with them, and Marina De Vos played squash with me, but then I ran out of time for that. More often I hill walk (mostly to work in Bath), cycle (mostly to work in Mannheim) and very occasionally play"

"There are contexts in which it is immoral to use generative AI. For example, if you are a judge responsible for grounding a decision in law, you cannot rest that on an approximation of previous cases unknown to you. You want an AI system that helps you retrieve specific, well-documented cases, not one that confabulates fictional cases. You need to ensure you procure the right kind of AI for a task, and the right kind is determined in part by the essentialness of human responsibility."

"I'm interested in how intelligence works, in people and in animals. (I don't think you can understand the former without the latter!) My research starts from a distributed model of intelligence called reactive, behavior-based reasoning. This approach has produced the first robots that can reliably interact with the real world at realistic, animal-like speeds. However, by the time I started working on this problem in 1993, it was already obvious that the approach wasn't scaling very well. In other words, no new purely behavior-based robots have come out that could behave in a significantly more complex way than the early projects such as Herbert and Polly ."

"The best supported theory in science is the theory of evolution. We don't understand evolution perfectly, but we understand it better than we understand gravity. If you don't know basic evolution theory, you will have trouble understanding not only biology, but also modern theories of society (including religion) and intelligence (including artificial intelligence). If you aren't getting a good background on evolution at school, try reading some of the links off John Wilkins's Evolution Links page."