The Blue Hill Library and Blue Hill Books are cosponsoring an author talk with local author and College of the Atlantic professor Gray Cox on Thursday, March 28 at 7:00 PM. 

Technology employing Artificial Intelligence systems needs to be wiser, not just more efficient and “smarter”. It must balance relevant values to make life more just, convivial, ecologically sustainable, and spiritually nourishing. This requires an expansion of the conceptions of rationality used in AI technology as well as in mainstream economics, politics, and ethics.

This book describes the kind of dialogical rationality needed by drawing on contemporary research on conflict resolution and peacemaking including Quaker, Gandhian, Indigenous, and other traditions of collaborative reasoning and ethical choice. To respond effectively to threats from ecological collapse, climate change, wars of mutually assured destruction, and out of control technology, it offers systematically wiser ways to reason in our daily lives and collectively transform our dominant institutions.

Gray Cox teaches philosophy, peace studies, language learning, and artificial intelligence as part of the College of the Atlantic’s program in Human Ecology.  He has been long involved in the development of international studies and languages at COA and led a number of study abroad programs in Mexico and France. He has written a wide variety of papers and three books: The Ways of Peace: A Philosophy of Peace as Action (1986); The Will at the Crossroads: A Reconstruction of Kant’s Moral Philosophy (1983); A Quaker Approach to Research: Collaborative Practice and Communal Discernment (2014). A fourth, From a Smarter Planet to a Wiser Earth: Artificial Intelligence and Collaborative Wisdom, will be published in 2022.  He is a long-term member of Acadia Friends Meeting and is also a co-founder and the current Clerk of the Quaker Institute for the Future. QIF is a think tank that supports published research informed by Quaker values like peace and ecological resilience and employs methods of spirit-led, communal discernment. He is a singer/songwriter who plays guitar, bones, a little clarinet, and has released several albums of original music in English, Spanish, and French. His studies included a B.A. at Wesleyan University, in 1974, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy, at Vanderbilt University, in 1981. He grew up in Bar Harbor, Maine.

This program is free and open to all. Copies of the book will be available for purchase. For more information, pleae email Kayleigh at kayleigh.thomas@bhpl.net or call the library at 374-5515.