# Topics > Entities > Personalities >  Melanie Mitchell

## Airicist

Personal website - melaniemitchell.me

twitter.com/melmitchell1

linkedin.com/in/melanie-mitchell-08a04a6

Melanie Mitchell on Wikipedia

Projects:

Book "Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans Hardcover", 2019

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## Airicist

Melanie Mitchell - The Collapse of Artificial Intelligence

May 13, 2019

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## Airicist

Article "We Shouldn’t be Scared by ‘Superintelligent A.I.’"
“Superintelligence” is a flawed concept and shouldn’t inform our policy decisions.

by Melanie Mitchell
October 31, 2019

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## Airicist

Melanie Mitchell: concepts, analogies, common sense & future of AI

Dec 28, 2019




> Melanie Mitchell is a professor of computer science at Portland State University and an external professor at Santa Fe Institute. She has worked on and written about artificial intelligence from fascinating perspectives including adaptive complex systems, genetic algorithms, and the Copycat cognitive architecture which places the process of analogy making at the core of human cognition. From her doctoral work with her advisors Douglas Hofstadter and John Holland to today, she has contributed a lot of important ideas to the field of AI, including her recent book, simply called Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast.

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## Airicist

Melanie Mitchell on AI: Intelligence is a Complex Phenomenon

Premiered Sep 20, 2020




> Melanie Mitchell is the Davis Professor of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, and Professor of Computer Science at Portland State University. Prof. Mitchell is the author of a number of interesting books such as Complexity: A Guided Tour and Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans. One interesting detail of her academic bio is that Douglas Hofstadter was her Ph.D. supervisor.
> 
> During this 90 min interview with Melanie Mitchell, we cover a variety of interesting topics such as: how she started in physics, went into math, and ended up in Computer Science; how Douglas Hofstadter became her Ph.D. supervisor; the biggest issues that humanity is facing today; my predictions of the biggest challenges of the next 100 days of the COVID19 pandemic; how to remain hopeful when it is hard to be optimistic; the problems in defining AI, thinking and human; the Turing Test and Ray Kurzweil’s bet with Mitchell Kapor; the Technological Singularity and its possible timeline; the Fallacy of First Steps and the Collapse of AI; Marvin Minsky’s denial of progress towards AGI; Hofstadter’s fear that intelligence may turn out to be a set of “cheap tricks”; the importance of learning and interacting with the world; the [hard] problem of consciousness; why it is us who need to sort ourselves out and not rely on God or AI; complexity, the future and why living in “Uncertain Times” is an unprecented opportunity.
> 
> My favorite quote that I will take away from this conversation with Melanie Mitchell is:
> 
> Intelligence is a very complex phenomenon and we should study it as such. It’s not the sum of a bunch of narrow intelligences but something much bigger.

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