11/09/2026
AI changes us, and we change AI.
Last week Professor Ron Chrisley spoke at the 52nd Cernobbio Forum, ‘Intelligence on the World’, Europe, and Italy, at Villa d’Este on Lake Como.
He joined the session Today the World of Tomorrow – Frontiers of Science, moderated by Alec Ross. including speakers Fabiola Gianotti, former director general of CERN, Omar M.Yaghi, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry and Will Marshall, CEO and co-founder of Planet Labs.
Professor Chrisley argued that ‘we need to keep changing how we think about AI as rapidly as the technology is changing’ and gave five examples:
1. Changing from an AI as an oracle that supplies answers to an interlocutor that helps us think.
2. Changing from chatbots to systems working across many kinds of data.
3. Changing from systems trained on other people’s records of the world to situated systems with their own histories of perception and action.
4. Changing from prediction alone to richer architectures incorporating reasoning, memory and tools.
5. Changing from generating what is merely likely to generating what is appropriate for a particular person and purpose. (Which may be unlikely).
On a different topic in a RAI broadcast Professor Chrisley was asked by Monica Maggioni about how Artificial Intelligence was initially met with great enthusiasm but is now a source of major concern.
“The shift from enthusiasm to concern is predictable because public discussion tends to oscillate between overclaiming capability and overclaiming danger. The truth is somewhere in between. The challenge is to separate what current systems can actually do from where they remain brittle and to identify the risks that arise from the technology itself versus those that arise from how organisations deploy it.
Ron Chrisley is Professor of Cognitive Science and AI at the University of Sussex within the department of Informatics.
Find out more about Sussex AI, our research and courses through the links in our bio.
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