This talk is part of the Princeton-Yale Ideas Series. 

Event Time

Saturday, July 20, 2024

Registration
9:30 am - 10:00 am

Presentation and Commentary
10:00 am - 11:05 am

Q&A
11:05 am - 11:30 am

Book Signing
11:30 am - 12:00 pm 

Location

Yale Center Beijing 
36th Floor Tower B of IFC Building 8 Jianguomenwai Avenue Chaoyang District, Beijing (Yong'anli Subway Station, Exit C) 

Registration and Fees

Registration
Please click “HERE” further below to register.

Please send an email to yalecenterbeijing@yale.edu if there are any problems. If you encounter any payment issues, please attach a screenshot that identifies the issue.

Ticket: Free for students and faculty (subject to approval); RMB 30 for regular admission. 

The language of the event will be English. 

The Event

We are at a crossroads in history. If we hope to share our planet successfully with one another and the AI systems we are creating, we must reflect on who we are, how we got here, and where we are heading. The Importance of Being Educable puts forward a provocative new exploration of the extraordinary facility of humans to absorb and apply knowledge. The remarkable “educability” of the human brain can be understood as an information processing ability. It sets our species apart, enables the civilization we have, and gives us the power and potential to set our planet on a steady course. Yet it comes hand in hand with an insidious weakness. While we can readily absorb entire systems of thought about worlds of experience beyond our own, we struggle to judge correctly what information we should trust.

In this visionary book, Leslie Valiant, a Turing Award recipient and computer scientist, argues that understanding the nature of our own educability is crucial to safeguarding our future. After breaking down how we process information to learn and apply knowledge, and drawing comparisons with other animals and AI systems, he explains why education should be humankind’s central preoccupation.

On the morning of July 20, Leslie Valiant will have an offline discussion with Lan Xue, Dean of Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University, to explore the importance of human "educability" in the era of AI.

Speakers

Leslie Valiant 
T. Jefferson Coolidge Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, Harvard University

Leslie Valiant is the T. Jefferson Coolidge Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University, and a recipient of the Turing Award and the Nevanlinna Prize for his foundational contributions to machine learning and computer science. He is the author of Probably Approximately Correct and Circuits of the Mind.

Lan Xue 
Dean, Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University

Lan Xue is a Distinguished Professor of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Tsinghua University, where he also serves as the Director of the Institute for AI International Governance, Director of the China Institute for Science and Technology Policy, and Co-Director of the Global Institute for SDGs.

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