L E A D E R S H I P

F O U N D E R / P R I N C I P A L

Professor Mark Dennis Robinson /MDR/ founded Singapore-based SEMIOTICA CYBERNETICS because of a deeply held belief in the transformative potential of artificial intelligence for industrial innovation and society writ large. After founding a Silicon Valley-based edtech startup, Robinson founded SEMIOTICA to translate innovations in AI, robotics, and computational bioethics into solutions for a global market.

Focused on problems in theoretical artificial intelligence, applied and theoretical bioethics, as well as the legal and social implications of emerging technologies, Robinson is an Associate Professor of medicine and an affiliated fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. Merging bioethics and science and technology studies, his book, The Market in Mind: How Financialization Is Shaping Neuroscience, Translational Medicine, and Innovation in Biotechnology (MIT Press), was the first to analyze the efficacy of translational neuroscience, and the impacts of bioinformatic software on global psychopharmaceutical innovation. Using neuroscience training from the University of Pennsylvania, Robinson has published research work in subjects ranging from global dilemmas in pharmacoeconomics, and neuropharmacoepistemology, to the commercialization of neuroscience innovations into brain-based neurotechnologies. Robinson has also published entries in the Oxford and World History Encyclopedias.

Robinson has garnered recognition from global institutions, including the International Neuroethics Society, Switzerland's Brocher Foundation, and Italy's Giannino Basseti Foundation. Robinson received the Trustee Prize at the University of Chicago, the Galbraith Prize at Harvard, and the Presidential Award at Princeton.

A former fellow at both Harvard and Yale Law Schools, Robinson studied computational psycholinguistics at Northwestern before earning master's degrees from the University of Chicago, a master's and Ph.D. from Princeton, and a degree in biomedical ethics from Harvard Medical School before winning the ISP Residential Fellowship at Yale Law School. After Yale, Robinson completed a master’s program at the University of Cambridge, where he discovered a novel way to use artificial intelligence to enhance human decision-making (USPTO Patent Application #63/771,218). Dr. Robinson is currently completing a patent creating sentience in humanoid robots and AI agents, providing them with the ability to reason, speak naturalistically, and (via novel semiotic technologies)—-when combined with spatial intelligence innovations being developed by others—-enable robots to ability to have naturalistic, semantically-informed interactions with the 3-D world.

Robinson also founded BRONZE, a startup ethnicity for nonheterosexual persons of African descent, seeking to escape entrenched diasporic homophobia via ethical divestment and the creation of new communities. A proponent of Separation Theory and Network States, Robinson believes that ethical separatism is the last step in achieving global peace in the new millennium. Extremely beneficial in the leaps they have achieved for human progress, enlightenment approaches are likely at the limits of their ‘addressable market’, reaching impasses that lie beyond the tolerance/ intolerance binary. In its wake, separatist solutions will be the new nonviolent post-enlightenment path to peace and prosperity for the world’s populations.

M A R K D E N N I S R O B I N S O N , P H D

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+ AI IS A TRANFORMATIVE MOMENT

While we understand the power of AI to help spur innovation across many markets, there is a dire need for higher-quality thinking and better facts to meet our complex contemporary challenges. AI is crucial for meeting growing market opportunities and needs and the enormous moral opportunities created by and via computational thinking.

Given the complexity of contemporary global problems and the profound limitations of the non-computational mind, proper ethics likely requires algorithms. The non-algorithmic mind births risks to the world—ethical, environmental, and economic. It behooves humanity to manage these risks using computational power and to see the problems that emerge from unassisted, low-quality thinking as a source of risk that may exceed those from AI.