Machines of loving grace: the quest for common ground between humans and robots

Abstract
John Markoff will speak on covering artificial intelligence and robots for the New York Times and other publications. He began reporting on Silicon Valley in 1977 and shifted his focus to machine intelligence beginning with the Pentagon's self driving vehicle grand challenge in 2004. He broke the story of Google's self driving car program in 2010 and his story on the rapid advances in neural networks appeared on the paper's front page in 2012.

BIO:
John Markoff, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, wrote for The New York Times’ science and technology beat for 28 years, where he was widely regarded as the paper’s star technology reporter. He is currently a Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has been a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley School of Journalism, and an adjunct faculty member at the Stanford Graduate Program on Journalism. In 2013, Markoff was part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team for Explanatory Reporting “for its penetrating look into business practices by Apple and other technology companies that illustrates the darker side of a changing global economy for workers and consumers.”

His books include: The High Cost of High Tech (with Lennie Siegel); Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier (with Katie Hafner); Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of America’s Most Wanted Computer Outlaw (with Tsutomu Shimomura); What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry; andMachines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots. Markoff is currently working on a biography of Stewart Brand.

Markoff continues to work as a freelance journalist for The Times and other organizations and volunteers at the Computer History Museum.