Week Two: June 29–July 6, 2024
Every summer Chautauqua Institution welcomes over 100,000 visitors, to celebrate community and prioritize personal growth. Many travel here to relax, renew and recharge on the shores of Chautauqua Lake. Join us for our historic 150 anniversary season and see for yourself why Chautauqua was, and continues to be, a cherished destination. Keep scrolling to explore Week Two’s Theme: The AI Revolution.
Featured Entertainment and Events
Chautauqua Lecture Series
The AI Revolution
Artificial intelligence has loomed large in cultural consciousness for more than a century, primarily relegated to speculative works of fiction. The technology is now seeing exponential growth and adoption, accelerating the need for answers to questions posed by novelists and scientists — questions of ethics, of law, of nature. With AI no longer niche and imagined but mainstream and real, what will we do with the tools it offers us for efficiency and creation? How do we balance risk with opportunity? Can artificial intelligence evolve into artificial humanity, or can it allow for humans to be more human?
Joanna Stern, senior personal technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal, opens the discussions on Monday, July 1, 2024, with an up-to-the-minute primer on how artificial intelligence has developed ever-more-rapidly, and considers where we may be headed as these remarkable and potentially dangerous technologies continue to evolve. On Tuesday, July 2, 2024, Conrad Tucker — who serves as both the Arthur Hamerschlag Career Development Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and commissioner of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce AI Commission on Competitiveness, Inclusion and Innovation — seeks to help us to understand, from an engineer’s perspective, the actual mechanics of AI and the large language models that drive it: how they were constructed, how they work, and what their potential is — both good and bad. The Arthur Hamerschlag Career Development Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, he will also provide insight into the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s AI Commission on Competitiveness, Inclusion and Innovation, tracking policymakers’ ability to manage the impact of AI on the American economy and society. Andrew Steer, the president and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund, joins the Chautauqua Lecture Series on Thursday, July 4, 2024, to share details about the Bezos Earth Fund’s newly announced AI for Climate and Nature Grand Challenge, which will award up to $100 million in grants to explore how modern AI might help address climate change and nature loss. Jamie Metzl, one of the world’s leading technology and healthcare futurists, closes the week on Friday, July 5, 2024, with a discussion of his latest book: Superconvergence: How the Genetics, Biotech, and AI Revolutions will Transform Our Lives, Work, and World.
Confirmed Lectures
Joanna Stern
Joanna Stern is an Emmy Award-winning technology journalist and NBC/CNBC contributor who has spent the better part of two decades covering gadgets and apps, and helping people make smarter tech decisions. Since 2013, she’s been a personal technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal where her explanatory reporting — in both writing and video — has garnered numerous awards. Stern opens the Chautauqua Lecture Series week on “The AI Revolution” with an up-to-the-minute primer on how artificial intelligence has developed ever-more-rapidly, and considers where we may be headed as these remarkable and potentially dangerous technologies continue to evolve.
At The Wall Street Journal, Stern’s reporting on AI has included putting fast-food drive-thrus “staffed” by chatbots to the test and examining popular AI photo apps that distort reality. In April 2023, she penned a column about creating an AI version — or deepfake — of herself, highlighting the technology’s double-edged potential. Stern began her technology writing career at Laptop Magazine and then spent three years at Engadget. In 2011, she and several colleagues left Engadget to create the technology news website that would eventually come to be known as The Verge. Prior to joining The Wall Street Journal, Stern was the technology editor at ABC News.
In 2016, Stern received a Gerald Loeb Award for her Wall Street Journal videos, and a second Gerald Loeb Award in 2022 for a series about TikTok. Her documentary about death and technology, “E-Ternal: A Tech Quest to Live Forever,” won the 2021 Emmy in the category of outstanding science, technology or environmental coverage. Stern is a graduate of Union College.
Conrad Tucker
Conrad Tucker is an Arthur Hamerschlag Career Development Professor of Mechanical Engineering and holds courtesy faculty appointments in machine learning, robotics, and biomedical engineering, and CyLab security and privacy at Carnegie Mellon University. His research focuses on employing machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques to predictively improve the design and output of engineered systems. He joins the Chautauqua Lecture Series to help us to understand, from an engineer’s perspective, the actual mechanics of AI and the large language models that drive it: how they were constructed, how they work, and what their potential is — both good and bad. He will also provide insight into the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s AI Commission on Competitiveness, Inclusion and Innovation, tracking policymakers’ ability to manage the impact of AI on the American economy and society.
Tucker explores applications of AI in domains including engineering design, healthcare, engineering education, and cybersecurity. He has served as PI/Co-PI on federally/non-federally funded grants from the National Science Foundation, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Army Research Laboratory, the Office of Naval Research via the NSF Center for eDesign, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In February 2016, he was invited by National Academy of Engineering President Dan Mote to serve as a member of the advisory committee for the NAE Frontiers of Engineering Education Symposium.
Tucker received his Ph.D., M.S. (industrial engineering), and MBA degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and his B.S. in mechanical engineering from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.
This Chautauqua Lecture Series program is presented in partnership with the African American Heritage House Lecture Series.
Andrew Steer
Andrew Steer is the president and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund, a $10 billion fund to address the pressing issues of climate change and nature in this decisive decade. He joins the Chautauqua Lecture Series to share details about the Bezos Earth Fund’s newly announced AI for Climate and Nature Grand Challenge. The initiative will award up to $100 million in grants to explore how modern AI might help address climate change and nature loss and inspire deeper collaboration between groups on the front line of environmental solutions and leading AI technology providers.
Steer joined the Bezos Earth Fund from the World Resources Institute, where he served as president and CEO for more than eight years. Prior to this, he served as the World Bank’s Special Envoy for Climate Change from 2010 to 2012. From 2007 to 2010, he served as director general at the UK Department of International Development. This followed 10 years in East Asia, where he was head of the World Bank in Vietnam and Indonesia.
Steer is a global agenda trustee for the World Economic Forum, a board chair of the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet, a member of the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, and member of the leadership council of Concordia. He was educated at the University of St. Andrews, the University of Pennsylvania, and Cambridge University, and has a Ph.D. in international economics and finance.
This program is a joint presentation of the Chautauqua Lecture Series and the Chautauqua Climate Change Initiative.
Jamie Metzl
Along with our new capabilities in genetics and biotechnology, AI will transform most every aspect of our personal and professional lives — how we live and work, our economies, our healthcare, the foods we eat, and our interactions with the world around us. To navigate these transformations, Jamie Metzl — one of the world’s leading technology and healthcare futurists — will join the Chautauqua Lecture Series to close a week on “The AI Revolution” with a discussion on his latest book: Superconvergence: How the Genetics, Biotech, and AI Revolutions will Transform Our Lives, Work, and World.
Metzl is the author of six books, including the international bestseller, Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity, which has been translated into 12 languages. A faculty member of Singularity University and NextMed Health, senior fellow of the Atlantic Council, and founder and chair of the global social movement, OneShared.World, in 2019 Metzel was appointed to the World Health Organization expert advisory committee on human genome editing.
Previously, Metzl served in the U.S. National Security Council, State Department, and Senate Foreign Relations Committee and with the United Nations in Cambodia. He appears regularly on national and international media and his syndicated columns and other writing in science, technology, and global affairs are featured in publications around the world. He is a former partner in a global private equity firm and serves on advisory boards for multiple biotechnology and other companies.
Metzl holds a Ph.D. from Oxford University, a law degree from Harvard Law School, and an undergraduate degree from Brown University.
Interfaith Lecture Series
Religion’s Intersections: Interdisciplinary Imagination with Science, Technology, and AI
Like all human enterprises, religious traditions are influenced by their intersection with other disciplines; in our 21st-century context, this includes significant impact from science and technology, including the arrival of mainstream applications for artificial intelligence. How does religion respond? What might this new form of machine learning mean for our understanding of ourselves, our universe, and the divine? Speakers from disciplines as distinct as engineering, ethics, and psychology will weigh in on the implications and potential of emerging technologies.
Confirmed Lectures
Nicholas Carr
Nicholas Carr is the bestselling author of several books on the human consequences of technology, including the Pulitzer Prize-finalist The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, and Nature, among other publications. He was recently the Richmond Visiting Professor of Sociology at Williams College, and earlier in his career served as executive editor of the Harvard Business Review. In 2015, he received the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity from the Media Ecology Association.
Margarita Guillory
Margarita Simon Guillory is an Associate Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Boston University. She is the inaugural Associate Director of digital humanities housed in the Boston University Center for the Humanities. Her publications include Social and Spiritual Transformation in African American Spiritual Churches (Routledge 2018) and co-editor of Esotericism in African American Religious Experience (Brill 2014). In addition to these works, she has published articles in the Journal of Gnostic Studies, Culture and Religion, and Pastoral Psychology. Her forthcoming book, Africana Religion in the Digital Age, explores the diverse ways that African Americans employ the Internet, social media, human enhancement technologies, and gaming to construct multidimensional modes of religious identities.
Sigal Samuel
Sigal Samuel is a senior reporter for Vox. She writes primarily about the future of consciousness, tracking advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience and their staggering ethical implications. Before joining Vox, she was the religion editor at The Atlantic. Sigal is also the author of two award-winning books. Osnat and Her Dove, a children’s book, tells the true story of the world’s first female rabbi. The Mystics of Mile End, a novel, tells the story of a dysfunctional family dealing with mysticism, madness, and mathematics in Montreal.
Sylvester Johnson
Sylvester A. Johnson is Associate Vice Provost for Public Interest Technology and Executive Director of the “Tech for Humanity” initiative advancing human-centered approaches to technology at Virginia Tech. He is the founding director of Virginia Tech’s Center for Humanities, which supports human-centered research and scholarship across disciplines in arts, humanities, and social sciences. Sylvester’s research has examined religion, race, and empire in the Atlantic world; religion and sexuality; national security practices; and the impact of intelligent machines and human enhancement on human identity and race. He is a Professor in the Department of Religion and Culture.
Sylvester is the author of The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity (Palgrave 2004), a study of race and religious hatred that won the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book award; and African American Religions, 1500-2000 (Cambridge 2015), an award-winning interpretation of five centuries of democracy, colonialism, and freedom in the Atlantic world. Johnson has also co-edited The FBI and Religion: Faith and National Security Before and After 9/11 (University of California 2017) and Religion and US Empire (NYU Press 2022). He is currently writing a book on being human in an age of intelligent machines, tentatively titled, “Do Robots Have Souls?”
He currently leads “Future Humans, Human Futures” at Virginia Tech, a series of research institutes and symposia funded by the Henry Luce foundation that focus on technology, ethics, and religion. He is also directing the creation of new curriculum, funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to prepare future talent at the intersection of humanities, social justice, and technology.
Matthew Crawford
Matthew B. Crawford earned a degree in physics, then a PhD in the history of political thought from the University of Chicago. A Senior Fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, his writings could be called philosophically informed cultural criticism, often with an historical angle. His books include Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (a New York Times bestseller, translated into 13 languages), The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction, and Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road. His shorter writings have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street journal, American Affairs, The New Atlantis, Le Monde, Le Figaro, The Sunday Times of London, and many other publications.
Weekly Chaplain
Bishop Cynthia Moore-Koikoi
Bishop Cynthia Moore-Koikoi was elected to the episcopacy in 2016. She serves as the resident bishop of the Pittsburgh Episcopal Area and one of the assigned bishops of the Harrisburg Episcopal Area.
Explore Performing and Visual Arts
The arts can sometimes bridge differences and illuminate perspectives as no other method can. Artistic expressions at Chautauqua — including professional and pre-professional offerings in classical and contemporary music, theater, opera, dance, visual arts and literary arts — aim to inspire, educate, entertain and engage a diverse and growing audience.
Places to Stay
If you love the events you see in Week Two, ensure you have accommodations. Space on the ground is limited, and accommodations go fast find reservations at the Hotel or Private Accommodations.
Dining & Shopping
Make your Chautauqua experience memorable! Share a delicious meal at one of our many restaurants. Or take piece of Chautauqua home with you from our unique shops.