Foresight's AI Salon: Gunnar Zarncke | Finding Agency in Real-World Data
Join Foresight Institute and aintelope's Gunnar Zarncke in his session entitled Finding Agency in Real-World Data
Before the salon, you can check out the app that we will use during a live demonstration here: https://uad-coalition-board.replit.app/.
This Salon asks: When we look at a system, how do we know where the real agent is? The one that has goals and pushes back, like people, animals, and maybe organizations. But in a deployed AI system, the agent may not be the model alone. It may be a loop of models, tools, memory, APIs, and users.
We will run a live group experiment. You can submit small signals into a shared board (the app above); we will watch as the data accumulates; then we see if we can find agents without being told who is cooperating or part of a loop.
Finding agents is the first step toward the larger question of how to align systems possibly smarter than humans. I will end with an outlook of the next steps.
Schedule
6 - 7 pm: Drinks & Social
7 - 8 pm: Talk, Q&A, & Breakouts
8 - 9 pm: Mingle & Hang
Speaker Bio: The founder of the German AI safety non-profit aintelope brings decades of experience with fleeting patterns in software systems to the study of hidden agency in real-world data.
Salon discussions are held under Chatham House Rule (don’t connect people to ideas when discussing them outside of this workshop).
Foresight’s AI Nodes offer grant funding, local compute and community hubs for AI for Science and Safety projects in Berlin and the Bay Area.