Message from the Director

Ever since we started reading science fiction in our childhood, we believed that robots would one day help humans with routine, physical tasks. The machines would be able to carry our suitcases, do our laundry, and cook us dinner. They might even understand our voice commands, but would never be as creative as humans. Over the decades, we - AI researchers - had been helping the machines learn basic skills, and scale them up.

One day in late 2022, we woke up to a new world in which science fiction became a reality, but a very different one from what we had imagined. Trained on a massive amount of products of human creativity, Generative AI can now write a poem, draw a picture, produce a video clip, and compose a pop song. It can also diagnose a disease, pen a commercial contract, strategize a marketing campaign, build a software system, resolve a customer service issue, and it can do that on scale. Meanwhile, we are still folding our laundry and cooking pasta.

Now, the world has to adapt, as quickly as it can, to the new reality. As researchers who have been contributing to technological progress, we have the moral obligation to lead the society on the path to adaptation. We need to make sure that all societal systems (commercial, legal, medical, educational, etc) are adjusting fast enough, and we need to provide plans and guidance to assure the adaptation is as smooth as possible. This requires conducting a new type of research done in multidisciplinary, multi-institutional collaboration. The Leir Research Institute for Business, Technology, and Society cordially invites researchers in all related fields to collaborate with us on truly transformational research projects!

Dr. Ron Bekkerman.