CDL Reading Group

In an age when the traditional lines between human and machine are increasingly blurred, the CDL Reading Group has been exploring the question: What does it mean to be human?

It’s easy to become preoccupied with the latest wave of technological triumphs and at the same time lose track of their implications for humanity.

Like the proverbial frog–in–the–gradually–heated–to–boiling–pot, we might be distracted by the glare of progress at the very moment that critical lines delineating humans versus machines are blurred.

CDL has traditionally focused on building and “getting things done.” Sometimes, however, it helps to step back and reflect. That has been the purpose of the CDL Reading Group.

Since its inception in fall 2020, the CDL Reading Group, led by Professor Ajay Agrawal, has engaged close to 550 participants including 155 Rotman alumni, 50 current students, 30 founders/CEOs of tech companies, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs Canada, a former Commander of the International Space Station, the first woman space traveller and CEO of X–Prize, a former head of McKinsey, the former managing partner of a large law firm, several venture capitalists and angel investors, scientists from DeepMind, Palantir, and Google, professors of law, economics, philosophy, political science, literature, medicine, and computer science.

The CDL Reading Group has met weekly to discuss these texts:

  • Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future, by Tim Urban (2017)
  • On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins (2004)
  • A Collection of Definitions of Intelligence, by Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter (2007); On the Measure of Intelligence, by Francois Chollet (2019); “John McCarthy’s Definition of Intelligence” by Richard Sutton in Journal of Artificial General Intelligence 11(2) 66–67, 2020
  • The Perfect Match, by Ken Liu (2012)
  • Machines Like Me, by Ian McEwan (2019)
  • The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values, by Brian Christian (2020)
  • Nexus, by Ramez Naam (2012)
  • The State Machine & Under the Gaze of Big Mother, Yudhanjaya Wijeratne (2020)
  • Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (1818)
  • Machinehood, S.B. Divya (2021)
  • Of the Madness of Mad Scientists and Cryogenics: A Symposium, from In Other Worlds, by Margaret Atwood (2011)
  • The Future of Everything, a 6min speech by Margaret Atwood (2018)
  • Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction, by Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto (second edition, 2020)
  • Falling in Love with Hominids, by Nalo Hopkinson (2015)
  • A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins (2021)
  • Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro (2021)
  • Human Compatible: AI and the Problem of Control, Stuart Russell (2019)
  • Value(s): Building a Better World for All by Mark Carney (2021)