Searching for Meaning in the Age of AI

Bryan McCann, You.com’s co-founder and CTO, shares his journey from studying philosophy and meaning to the Stanford Computer Science Department working on groundbreaking AI research alongside Richard Socher. Right now, AI is reshaping everything we hold dear — our jobs, creativity, and identities. It’s also our greatest source of inspiration. The Age of AI is simultaneously a Renaissance, Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution and likely source of humanity’s greatest existential crisis. To surmount this, Bryan will discuss how he uses AI responses as new starting points rather than answers, building teams like neural networks optimized for learning and how the answer to our meaning crisis may be for humans to be more like AI. Exploring AI’s impact on politics, economics, healthcare, education and culture, Bryan asserts that we must all take part in authoring humanity’s new story — AI can inspire us to become something new, rather than merely replace what we are now.