Tanner Lectures on Human Values

Established in 1976, the Tanner Lectures on Human Values seek to advance and reflect upon the scholarly and scientific learning relating to human values. The lectures, which are permanently sponsored at nine institutions, including Yale, are free and open to the public.

The Tanner Lectures are funded by an endowment received by the University of Utah from Obert Clark Tanner and Grace Adams Tanner. The lectureship embraces the deep humanistic values and interests of the Tanners. Grace’s interests drew her toward biology and anthropology, where she contributed generously, while Obert joined the faculty of philosophy at the University of Utah, where he focused on moral philosophy and philosophy of religion.

Yale first hosted a Tanner Lecture in 1989 with political historian John Pocock’s lecture on Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Lecturers in subsequent years have included humanists from a wide range of fields, including Elaine Scarry, Salman Rushdie, Oliver Sacks, Paul Gilroy, Bruno Latour, and Judith Butler. Most recently, political theorist Wendy Brown delivered the 2019 Tanner Lectures on Human Values, with talks jointly titled “Politics and Knowledge in Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber.”

Fei-Fei Li, Stanford University, "What We See and What We Value: AI with a Human Perspective"

2022 Tanner Lecture on Artificial Intelligence and Human Values

Fei-Fei Li of Stanford University will deliver the 2022 Tanner Lecture on Human Values and Artificial Intelligence this fall at the Whitney Humanities Center. The lecture, “What We See and What We Value: AI with a Human Perspective,” presents a series of AI projects—from work on ambient intelligence in healthcare to household robots—to examine the relationship between visual and artificial intelligence. Visual intelligence has been a cornerstone of animal intelligence; enabling machines to see is hence a critical step toward building intelligent machines. Yet developing algorithms that allow computers to see what humans see—¬and what ¬they don’t see—raises important social and ethical questions.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li is the Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and Denning Co-Director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI). During her 2017–2018 sabbatical, Dr. Li was a vice president at Google and chief scientist of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning at Google Cloud. She co-founded the national nonprofit AI4ALL, which trains K-12 students from underprivileged communities to become future leaders in AI. Dr. Li also serves on the National AI Research Resource Task Force commissioned by Congress and the White House and is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li’s talk is one of seven Tanner Lectures on Artificial Intelligence and Human Values, which is a special series of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values are funded by an endowment received by the University of Utah from Obert Clark Tanner and Grace Adams Tanner. Established in 1976, the Tanner Lectures seek to advance and reflect upon scholarly and scientific learning relating to human values. The lectures, which are permanently sponsored at nine institutions, including Yale, are free and open to the public.

Poster