Get ready for a provocative and eye-opening conversation on the new, unprecedented world of Artificial Intelligence!

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Dive into the rapidly shifting landscape of AI and its real-world impact with Dr. Vivienne Ming, renowned AI expert and author of the newly released Robot-Proof: When Machines Have All the Answers, Build Better People. She’ll be joined in conversation by Dr. Keith Holyoak, UCLA Distinguished Professor of Psychology, poet, and leading researcher on human thinking.

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In Robot-Proof, Dr. Ming, hailed as a “force of nature in the AI world”, explores both the unsettling and astonishing ways individuals, companies, and societies are already responding to the rise of AI. Rather than a dense technical manual or a simplistic utopian/dystopian take, Robot-Proof puts people at the center, asking what it really means to live, work, and adapt in an increasingly automated world.

 

Join UCLA’s Friends of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior for this engaging discussion at the intersection of technology, psychology, and everyday life where big questions meet thoughtful, grounded perspectives on the future unfolding around us.

 

Bios: 

Vivienne Ming, PhD is a theoretical neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and author. She is the Founder and Executive Chair of The Human Trust, a philanthropic "mad science" incubator, and the Chief Scientist at Possibility Sciences, where she is pioneering systems for hybrid human-machine collective intelligence. She earned her PhD from Carnegie Mellon, then held joint appointments at Stanford and UC Berkeley. Vivienne was an early pioneer in using AI for human potential. As Chief Scientist of Gild, she built machine learning models trained on 122 million professionals to predict human capability. Today, through The Human Trust, she has developed AI to treat diabetes and bipolar disorder, reunite orphan refugees, and help autistic children learn facial expressions.

 

Dr. Keith Holyoak, a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UCLA, is a leading researcher in the field of human thinking, as well as a poet. His scientific work combines behavioral investigations with both cognitive neuroscience and computational modeling of cognition. A recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is also a member of the Society of Experimental Psychologists, which awarded him the Warren Medal in 2022. He is the author, co-author, or co-editor of several books in cognitive science, including Induction: Processes of Inference, Learning and Discovery (1986), Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought (1995), The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science (2001), The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning (2012), The Spider’s Thread: Metaphor in Mind, Brain, and Poetry (2019), and The Human Edge: Analogy and the Roots of Creative Intelligence (2025). He has also published a volume of his translations of classical Chinese poetry, as well as four volumes of his own poetry. Keith’s fascination with analogy and symbolism carried him over to a parallel career as a poet.

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