The Nature of Artificial Intelligence
October 20 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm CDT
AI is all around us—recognizing faces in photos, transcribing speech, answering questions, writing essays, generating code, and much more. But rapidly improving AI is poised to play a much bigger role in all our lives.
In this lecture, Melanie Mitchell, a complexity scientist at the Santa Fe Institute and a highly regarded expert in artificial intelligence, will describe how contemporary AI works, how “intelligent” it really is, and what our expectations—and concerns—about its near-term and long-term prospects should be.
Linda Hall Library is presenting this free lecture as part of celebrating their current exhibition, Alchemy of Knowledge: Science and Mystery from Shakespeare to A.I. ESU members and Friends of ESU are invited to attend this fascinating free lecture either in-person or virtually. Note: in-person registration begins September 8 at 9:00 am.
When: Tuesday, October 20, 2026, at 7:00 PM CT
Where: Linda Hall Library, 5109 Cherry St., Kansas City, MO
Tickets: Free in-person lecture but registration required. Registration opens on September 8, 2026 at 9:00 AM CT. Click on this link on September 8 to register for the in-person lecture. In-person registrations cannot be made before September 8, 2026.
Virtual Lecture: If you prefer to watch this program virtually via Zoom, you may register now. Please click here to register for the virtual program.
Parking: Free parking at the library
About Melanie Mitchell
Melanie Mitchell is James B. Alley, Jr. Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Her current research focuses on conceptual abstraction, analogy-making, and visual recognition in artificial intelligence systems.
Melanie is the author or editor of six books and numerous scholarly papers in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and complex systems. Her book Complexity: A Guided Tour, won the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award and was named by Amazon.com as one of the ten best science books of 2009. Her latest book is Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans.
Melanie originated the Santa Fe Institute’s Complexity Explorer platform, which offers online courses and other educational resources related to the field of complex systems. Her online course “Introduction to Complexity” has been taken by over 25,000 students and is one of Course Central’s “top fifty online courses of all time”.