Professor Li Wei

Professor of Applied Linguistics

Institute of Education, University College London

Keynote Speaker

Bio

Professor Li Wei is Director and Dean of the UCL Institute of Education, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, which has been ranked world number one for Education in the QS subject ranking for the last 12 years in a row. He is a language scientist and specialises in language development of bilingual and multilingual children and language in education policy and practice. He is Fellow of the British Academy, Academia Europaea, Academy of Social Sciences (UK), and Royal Society of Arts (UK).

Keynote Speech Title

Changing Human Sociality in a Post-AI Era and Implications for Language and Social Interaction

Speech Abstract

The AI era has changed human sociality from traditional person-to-person engagement to a more complex human-machine-human -network, with new demands for humans to adapt our ways of interacting and socialising. As we are contemplating a world where machines behave more and more like humans, are we expecting to see a further extension of industrial trend of making humans behave like machines, or a return to ‘artisanal’ or human-exclusive experiences? And what specifically are required of humans in terms of our linguistic and communication capabilities and skills? This talk attempts to answer such questions by looking into what cannot be replaced of human linguistic and interactional capacity by advanced AI agents, or, to put it another way, what humans should not give up to machines, to maintain our uniquely human nature in the posthuman and post-AI era.