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From: John Brockman < To: Jeffrey Epstein <jecvacation@gmail.com> Subject: Invitation: Launch Event @ Brattle Theatre & Gala Dinner (iI9, Benedetto for POSSIBLE MINDS Date: Fri, 21 Dee 2018 21:01:23 +0000 'Artificial intelligence is today's story—the story behind all other stories. It is the Second Coming and the Apocalypse at the same time: good Al versus evil Al." —John Brockman Dear Jeffrey, Katinka Matson, Max Brockman, and I are pleased to invite you to join us in a gala evening to celebrate the publication of Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at Al (click link for cover/contributors/contents). DATE: Thursday, February 21, 2019 TIME: 6:00 - 7:30pm - The Brattle Theatre, A program of lightning presentations, conversations, and contributors to the book include: George Church, George Dyson, Peter Galison, Neil Gershenfeld, Caroline Jones, David Kaiser, Seth Lloyd, Sandy Pentland, Steven Pinker, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Stephen Wolfram. 7:45 - 10:00pm - Dinner for 60 at Benedetto (Private Dining Room) in the Charles Hotel, 1 Bennett Street, Cambridge, MA BACKSTORY There's a personal poignancy about this project. One day in 1965, while I was working as the manager of the Film-Makers' Cinematheque in NYC, the phone rang, and I was introduced to A.K. Solomon, Chairman of the Biophysics Department at Harvard and Walter Rosenblith, sensory communications researcher at MIT. Along with Harold "Doc" Edgerton at MIT and Anthony Oettinger of Harvard, they had been reading about "The Expanded Cinema Festival" I was producing at the Cinematheque, where the artists were reading Norbert Wiener and bringing his cybernetic ideas about the nonlinear relationship between input and output in the control of analog systems into their work. The press picked up on it and it was big news. This resulted in an invitation to me to join Solomon and Rosenblith in co-organizing a meeting in Cambridge between Wiener's closest colleagues at Harvard-MIT and the NY avant-garde artists interested in and inspired by his work. The occasion marked the first anniversary of his death. Since that time, I've known, and worked with nearly all the major figures in Cybernetics, 2nd order Cybernetics, and Al. Eventually, these activities led to an evening in London, in April 2016, now known as "The Quality Chop House Society Dinner." The impetus was my desire to learn about new developments in self- improving, unsupervised machine learning. Present at the dinner were Demis Hassabis, David Deutsch, Ian McEwan, Brian Eno, Terry Gilliam, and Hans Ulrich Obrist. The dinner led to the first meeting in Washington, CT, in September 2016, where Neil Gershenfeld suggested a group project re- write Wiener's book to deal with contemporary issues confronting society 70 years later. This was seconded by Seth Lloyd who suggested the need for an update from the field. The next event was The Al Xmas Dinner in Cambridge, Mass, in December 2016; The 2nd Quality Chop House Society Dinner in March 2017; and most recently, after completion of Possible Minds, The Brockman Conference in which fifteen individuals who have been thinking about these matters over their entire careers EFTA01010803 convened in Morris, CT, to discuss the importance of the book and to begin planning an ongoing program--a present-day version of the highly influential Macy Conferences of the 1940s and 1950s. Fifty-three years later, I am still at it. And now, back to Cambridge for the launch event for Possible Minds. We very much hope you can join us. RSVP to Happy holidays! Best, JB •••.•••• John Brockman "Enlightening, entertaining, and exciting reading."-Publishers Weekly Pre-order Possible Minds (forthcoming, Penguin Press, Feb 19th) EFTA01010804