Bulletin No. 1, 2021

The New Gospel According to A.I. I must have been six when I first heard about AI. Unsurprisingly, that knowledge came from Steven Spielberg ’s rather too obviously named treatment of the subject, A.I. I did not remember much of the film, save for the part where the protagonist, a robot boy named David, goes to the bottom of a submerged Manhattan and prays to a mossy statue of the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio for the next 2,000 years to be made human and thus eligible for the love of its owner. Like the anti-tech mob that it wins over with its endearing realism earlier in the story, I could not help but feel for it, seeing perhaps also something of my child self in it. But I knew as soon as the film ended that I had taken it too seriously. When the DVD player, being already the pinnacle of human technology in the reality of the early 2000s, sluggishly spat out the disc, I knew it was just a fantasy. The invention of sentient robots, the ethical short circuits they create, a full- on machine takeover—all these were too remote a prospect at the time and, as I now suspect, are probably allegories of some of humanity’s more familiar problems. Twenty years on, these scenarios remain in the realm of science fiction. This is not to say, however, that things are as they were 20 years ago. Turn on your TV, and you are guaranteed to hear at least one mention of AI every 15 minutes, be it in a commercial for the latest express loan services or an ad for some electrical appliance that you would never have dreamt of having use for a brain. The world of AI as painted by Spielberg is still in the imagination, but this imagination is now seen as coming closer to materializing and is gaining a foothold in the public discourse, alongside much hype and unease. Manymight have forgotten we were in a similar position with the coming of IT, having an equally frantic conversation, exactly 20 years ago. Not long before Spielberg released his film, the Chinese University Bulletin ran an issue titled ‘IT: The Name of the Game’. With another shift in our way of life at hand, the Bulletin spoke to over a dozen AI researchers across all fields at CUHK in that same spirit of cutting through the noise and foregrounding what is truly at stake. This is that story of the advancements in science, medicine and business we havemadewith AI, a story of what it means to society, the arts, law and ethics, and education—a story, ultimately, of what it now means to be human. 2 CHINESE UNIVERSITY BULLETIN NO.1, 2021