AstroAI Lunch Talks - August 3, 2026 - Josh Speagle
03 Aug 2026 - Joshua Wing
The video can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIXt5lqHcos
Speaker: Josh Speagle (U. Toronto)
Title: What exactly are we doing?
Abstract: The advent of AI, especially autonomous agentic systems, have transformed and will continue to transform learning, higher education, and research in profound ways. In this open-ended interactive talk, I will give a live demo where we will try to write an submittable ApJ paper in under an hour, during which we will confront and discuss hard questions such as: Why we are here? Why (and what) do we want to learn? What is the purpose of research and our role in it? And, maybe most important, what exactly we should be striving for? Throughout the discussion, I will try to highlight not only what is possible with these tools, but also how some of the history behind technological revolutions, the relationship between humans and technology, and the way we learn might together show us what things might be (or not be) different this time around.