VASE will host its Annual Fall meeting on the Middlebury College campus on October 10, 2023 with Josh Bongard as its keynote speaker. The title of his presentation is "AI-designed organisms: a case study in the social impacts of AI."

"The successful commercialization of generative AI is having, and will continue to have, a wealth of social impacts. We will begin with an exploration of these impacts by reviewing what generative AI is, and how its flood of written material, code, and creative content is challenging traditional institutions like IP protection, regulatory approval, and social norms. I will focus in particular on work from my own group on “AI-designed organisms”: an AI system that is capable of designing wholly new organisms that are not genetically modified, and differ in form and function from any current or extinct species. This trickle of AI-generated biology will soon become a flood, resulting in a future in which almost anyone can create organisms with form and function beyond human intuition, that grapple intelligently and safely with future threats/opportunities beyond our ability to imagine, using biological mechanisms beyond our ability to hypothesize."
~Josh Bongard