NJHN January 25 Program – AI: The Promise & The Peril with Sen. Sanders & Dr. Hinton (video presentation via Zoom only)

For our program this month we’ll watch a video of a conversation between Senator Bernie Sanders and Nobel laureate Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, often described as the “Godfather of AI.” Their conversation, titled “AI: The Promise & The Peril” took place at the Institute of Politics and Public Service at Georgetown University on November 19, 2025.

One of the defining questions of the next decade: will artificial intelligence strengthen democracy and public service or undermine them?

This is a Zoom-only event and registration is required at:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/d-JOd_peTG6DM9j5-nnjnQ
To insure our event security, all registrations must be approved now, and after registering you’ll receive a confirmation email from Zoom with the link to join the meeting.

The program will start at 1:30 PM. The video is 1 hour, 12 mins. long. Our discussion will follow the video. Free and open to the public. Please feel free to share the event with anyone you think would be interested.

Bernie Sanders is an American politician and activist serving as the senior United States senator from Vermont, a seat he has held since 2007. He is the longest-serving independent in U.S. congressional history, but maintains a close relationship with the Democratic Party, having caucused with House and Senate Democrats for most of his congressional career and sought the party’s presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020. Ideologically a democratic socialist, Sanders is regarded as one of the main leaders of the modern American progressive movement.

Geoffrey Hinton is a British-Canadian computer scientist, cognitive scientist, and cognitive psychologist known for his work on artificial neural networks. He is a University Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto. From 2013 to 2023, he divided his time working for Google Brain and the University of Toronto before publicly announcing his departure from Google in May 2023, citing concerns about the many risks of AI technology. He is a co-awardee of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for “foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”

Disclaimer: The views, information, and opinions expressed by our program speakers are solely their own and are not expressly shared or endorsed by New Jersey Humanist Network. The primary purpose of our speaker programs is to educate, inform and stimulate conversation.