This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Artificial General Intelligence: Once upon a time, this was considered a pipe dream, a fantasy of dreamers with no sense of the practical limitations of real AI. That was last year. Now, AGI is an explicit goal of many enterprises, notably among them Simuli. Their CEO, Rachel St. Clair, co-founded the company with Ben Goertzel, who has also been on this show. Rachel is a Fellow of the Center for Future Mind, with a doctorate in Complex Systems and Brain Sciences from Florida Atlantic University. She researches artificial general intelligence, focusing on complex systems and neuromorphic learning algorithms. Her goal is to “help create human-like, conscious, artificial, general intelligence to help humans solve the worst of our problems.”  In part 1 we talk about markers for AGI, distinctions between it and narrow artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, robotics, and embodiment, and… disco balls. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.          

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Since I published my first book on AI in 2017, the public conversation and perception of the existential risk - risk to our existence - from AI has evolved and broadened. I talk about how that conversation has changed from Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence, the "hard take-off" and what that means, and through to the tossing about of cryptic signatures like p(doom) and e/acc, which I explain and critique. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.          

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Increasing AI in weapons: is this a good thing (more selective targeting, fewer innocents killed) or bad (risk of losing control in critical situations)? It's hard to decide where to stand, and many people can't help but think of Skynet and don't get further. Here to help us pick through those arguments, calling from Munich is my guest, Frank Sauer, head of research at the Metis Institute for Strategy and Foresight and a senior research fellow at the Bundeswehr University in Munich. He has a Ph.D. from Goethe University in Frankfurt and is an expert in the field of international politics with a focus on security. His research focuses on the military application of artificial intelligence and robotics. He is a member of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. He also serves on the International Panel on the Regulation of Autonomous Weapons and the Expert Commission on the responsible use of technologies in the European Future Combat Air System.  In part two we talk about psychology of combat decisions, AI and strategic defense, and nuclear conflict destabilization. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.          

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Increasing AI in weapons: is this a good thing (more selective targeting, fewer innocents killed) or bad (risk of losing control in critical situations)? It's hard to decide where to stand, and many people can't help but think of Skynet and don't get further. Here to help us pick through those arguments, calling from Munich is my guest, Frank Sauer, head of research at the Metis Institute for Strategy and Foresight and a senior research fellow at the Bundeswehr University in Munich. He has a Ph.D. from Goethe University in Frankfurt and is an expert in the field of international politics with a focus on security. His research focuses on the military application of artificial intelligence and robotics. He is a member of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. He also serves on the International Panel on the Regulation of Autonomous Weapons and the Expert Commission on the responsible use of technologies in the European Future Combat Air System.  In this first part we talk about the ethics of autonomy in weapons systems and compare human to machine decision making in combat. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.          

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Literally writing the book on AI is my guest Peter Norvig, who is coauthor of the standard text, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, used in 135 countries and 1500+ universities. Peter is a Distinguished Education Fellow at Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute and a researcher at Google. He was head of NASA Ames's Computational Sciences Division and a recipient of NASA's Exceptional Achievement Award in 2001. He has taught at USC, Stanford, and Berkeley, from which he received a PhD in 1986 and the distinguished alumni award in 2006. He’s also the author of the world’s longest palindromic sentence.  In this second half of the interview, we talk about how the rise in prominence of AI in the general population has changed how he communicates about AI, his feelings about the calls for slowdown in model development, and his thinking about general intelligence in large language models; and AI Winters. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.          

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Literally writing the book on AI is my guest Peter Norvig, who is coauthor of the standard text, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, used in 135 countries and 1500+ universities. (The other author, Stuart Russell, was on this show in episodes 86 and 87.) Peter is a Distinguished Education Fellow at Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute and a researcher at Google. He was head of NASA Ames's Computational Sciences Division and a recipient of NASA's Exceptional Achievement Award in 2001. He has taught at the University of Southern California, Stanford University, and the University of California at Berkeley, from which he received a PhD in 1986 and the distinguished alumni award in 2006. He’s also the author of the world’s longest palindromic sentence.  In this first part of the interview, we talk about the evolution of AI from the symbolic processing paradigm to the connectionist paradigm, or neural networks, how they layer on each other in humans and AIs, and Peter’s experiences in blending the worlds of academic and business.  All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.          

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   The worlds of academia and political upheaval meet in my guest Michal Kosinski, who was behind the first press article warning against Cambridge Analytica, which was at the heart of a scandal involving the unauthorized acquisition of personal data from millions of Facebook users and impacting the 2016 Brexit and US Presidential election votes through the use of AI to microtarget people through modeling their preferences. Michal also co-authored Modern Psychometrics, a popular textbook, and has published over 90 peer-reviewed papers in prominent journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Nature Scientific Reports and others that have been cited over 18,000 times. Michal has a PhD in psychology from the University of Cambridge, as well as master’s degrees in psychometrics and social psychology In the second half of the interview, we pivot to the Theory of Mind – which is the ability of a creature to understand that another has a mind – and research around whether AI has it. Michal has amazing new research in that respect. He also says, "Without a question, GPT-4 and similar models are the most competent language users on this planet." All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.          

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   The worlds of academia and political upheaval meet in my guest Michal Kosinski, who was behind the first press article warning against Cambridge Analytica, which was at the heart of a scandal involving the unauthorized acquisition of personal data from millions of Facebook users and impacting the 2016 Brexit and US Presidential election votes through the use of AI to microtarget people through modeling their preferences. Michal also co-authored Modern Psychometrics, a popular textbook, and has published over 90 peer-reviewed papers in prominent journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Nature Scientific Reports and others that have been cited over 18,000 times. Michal has a PhD in psychology from the University of Cambridge, as well as master’s degrees in psychometrics and social psychology, positioning him to speak to us with authority about how AI has and may shape the beliefs and behaviors of people en masse. In this first part of the interview, we delve into just that, plus the role of social media, and Michal's take on what privacy means today. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.          

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   In our now-traditional end-of-year episode, we look back on the year to date and forward to the year to be. I am joined by previous guest Calum Chace, co-host of the London Futurists podcast and author of The Economic Singularity, and Justin Grammens, founder of the AppliedAI conference and podcast. Together, we review what happened with AI in 2023 and make some predictions for 2024. We look back at the impact of large language models such as #ChatGPT and forward to how they will evolve and change the workplace, economy, and society. We also discuss the future of regulation, the EU AI Act, the 2024 US elections, disinformation, and the future of education. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.          

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Making movies about AI with AI is Tabitha Swanson, who comes to tell us how that works - and what it was like exhibiting it at the Venice Film Festival during the writers'/actors' strikes. Tabitha is a Berlin-based multi-disciplinary designer, creative technologist, and filmmaker. Her practice includes 3D, animation, augmented reality, digital fashion, graphic design, and UX/UI. She has worked with brands including Vogue Germany, Nike, Highsnobiety, Reebok, and Origins, and has exhibited at Miami Art Basel, Fotografiska,  Transmediale, and Cadaf Arts among others.  Her part of the White Mirror project saw her doing everything from writing to cinematography with the latest AI tools like Runway Gen-2, ChatGPT, and Stable Diffusion, lowering typical animation costs from $10,000/second to $10,000 per minute. She explains what those tools are good at and where their limitations are, and helps us understand how they will evolve and impact the roles of humans in the movie industry. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.          

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   At the intersection of scientific research and artificial intelligence lies our guest Oren Etzioni, professor emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Washington and most notably the founding CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) in Seattle, founded by the late Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft. His awards include AAAI Fellow and Seattle’s Geek of the Year.  Oren grew the institute to a team of over 200 researchers and created singularly important tools such as the Semantic Scholar, search engine that can understand scientific literature, and Mosaic, a knowledge base formed by extracting scientific knowledge from text. This is hugely important because of just how much the rate of research paper creation now outstrips the ability of researchers to read it. AI could transform the productivity of scientific research by unprecedented measures. In this conclusion of the interview we talk about AI2’s scientific assistance project called Aristo, Oren’s views on the concerns about AI and how to address them, and his Hippocratic Oath for AI practitioners. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.          

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   At the intersection of scientific research and artificial intelligence lies our guest Oren Etzioni, professor emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Washington and most notably the founding CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, founded by the late Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft. His awards include AAAI Fellow and Seattle’s Geek of the Year.  Oren grew the institute to a team of over 200 researchers and created singularly important tools such as the Semantic Scholar, search engine that can understand scientific literature, and Mosaic, a knowledge base formed by extracting scientific knowledge from text. This is hugely important because of just how much the rate of research paper creation now outstrips the ability of researchers to read it. AI could transform the productivity of scientific research by unprecedented measures. In part 1 we talk about parallels between AI and the human brain, the Semantic Scholar, and the potential for AI accelerating research through understanding scientific literature.  All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.          

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   There is a global teacher shortage, and Pauldy Otermans and Dev Aditya, founders of the Otermans Institute, are addressing that with #AI through creating a digital human AI teacher, called Beatrice. Their mission is to upskill 750- million underserved students globally by 2030. Beatrice appears as an on-screen avatar that converses with students. Pauldy is a neuroscientist and psychologist with a PhD in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience from Brunel University. She was named one of the “22 most influential women in the UK of 2022” by Start-Up Magazine UK. Dev is a Young Global Innovator and under 30 Social Entrepreneur, recognized by Innovate UK with research experience at the Alan Turing Institute and Brunel University, London. In the conclusion of the interview they describe how the AI teachers work, and their definitions of Teaching and Learning 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.          

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   There is a global teacher shortage, and Pauldy Otermans and Dev Aditya, founders of the Otermans Institute, are addressing that with #AI through creating a digital human AI teacher, called Beatrice. Their mission is to upskill 750- million underserved students globally by 2030. Beatrice appears as an on-screen avatar that converses with students. Pauldy is a neuroscientist and psychologist with a PhD in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience from Brunel University. She was named one of the “22 most influential women in the UK of 2022” by Start-Up Magazine UK. Dev is a Young Global Innovator and under 30 Social Entrepreneur, recognized by Innovate UK with research experience at the Alan Turing Institute and Brunel University, London. In this first half of the interview we talk about the teacher shortage and the socioeconomic consequences of addressing it via an AI teacher. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.          

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   We're talking with Jaan Tallinn, who has changed the way the world responds to the impact of #AI. He was one of the founding developers of Skype and the file sharing application Kazaa, and that alone makes him noteworthy to most of the world. But he leveraged his billionaire status conferred by that success to pursue a goal uncommon among technology entrepreneurs: reducing existential risk. In other words, saving the human race from possible extinction through our own foolhardiness or fate. He has co-founded and funded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, in Cambridge, England, and the Future of Life Institute, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the conclusion of the interview, we talk about value alignment and how that does or doesn’t intersect with large language models, FLI and their world building project, and the instability of the world’s future.  All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   The attention of the world to the potential impact of AI owes a huge debt to my guest Jaan Tallinn. He was one of the founding developers of Skype and the file sharing application Kazaa, and that alone makes him noteworthy to most of the world. But he leveraged his billionaire status conferred by that success to pursue a goal uncommon among technology entrepreneurs: reducing existential risk. In other words, saving the human race from possible extinction through our own foolhardiness or fate. He has co-founded and funded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, in Cambridge, England, and the Future of Life Institute, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He's also a member of the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and a key funder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. In this first part, we talk about the problems with current #AI frontier models, Jaan's reaction to GPT-4, the letter causing for a pause in AI training, Jaan's motivations in starting CSER and FLI, how individuals and governments should react to AI risk, and Jaan's idea for how to enforce constraints on AI development. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Giving us a long perspective on the impact of today's large language models and #ChatGPT on society is Bart Selman, professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. He’s been helping people understand the potential and limitations of AI for several decades, commenting on computer vision, self-driving vehicles, and autonomous weapons among other technologies. He has co-authored over 100 papers, receiving a National Science Foundation career award and an Alfred P. Sloan research fellowship. He is a member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a contributing scientist at the two Asilomar conferences on responsible AI development. In the conclusion of our interview we talk about self-driving cars, the capability of large language models to synthesize knowledge across many human domains, Richard Feynman, our understanding of language, Bertrand Russell, AIs as co-authors on research papers, and where Bart places us on a scale of artificial general intelligence ability.  All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Giving us a long perspective on the impact of today's large language models and #ChatGPT on society is Bart Selman, professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. He’s been helping people understand the potential and limitations of AI for several decades, commenting on computer vision, self-driving vehicles, and autonomous weapons among other technologies. He has co-authored over 100 papers, receiving a National Science Foundation career award and an Alfred P. Sloan research fellowship. He is a member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In the first part of the interview we talk about common sense, artificial general intelligence, computer vision, #LLM and their impact on computer programming, and how much they might really be understanding. Bart will also give his take on how good they are, how to understand how they’re working, and his experiments in getting ChatGPT to understand geometry. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   The first area to see a dramatic impact from #ChatGPT was when it crushed term papers and sent teachers scurrying for ways to assess their students. Now that we've had nearly a year to evaluate the impact of #AI on #education, I look at how assessments and teaching have been affected and how schools might adapt to the incredible opportunities of generative AI. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   What effect will #AI, especially large language models like #ChatGPT, have on jobs? The conversation is intense and fractious. I attempt to shed some light on those effects, and discuss some of the different predictions and proposals for distributing the dividend from reducing costs and increasing markets through deploying AI. How will that capital get to where it is needed? All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   The United Kingdom government is holding a Summit on Artificial Intelligence at the storied Bletchley Park on November 1 and 2. Luminaries of #AI will be helping government authorities understand the issues that could require regulation or other government intervention. Our invitation to attend may have been lost in the post. But I do have reflections on the AI risks that will (or should) be presented at this event and some analysis and thought-provoking questions prompted by excellent events on these topics I recently attended by the London Futurists and MKAI. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Radiology found itself in the crosshairs of the debate about AI automating jobs when in 2016 AI expert Geoffrey Hinton said that AI would do just that to radiologists. That hasn't happened - but will it?  To get to the bottom of this, I talked with Matthew Lungren, MD, Chief Medical Information Officer at Nuance Communications, a Microsoft company applying AI to healthcare workflows, and the name that comes at the top of the list when you look up #radiology and #AI. He also has a pediatric radiology practice at UCSF  and previously led the Stanford [University] Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Imaging. More recently he served as Principal for Clinical AI/ML at Amazon Web Services in World Wide Public Sector Healthcare. He has an impressive oeuvre of over 100 publications, including work on multi-modal data fusion models for healthcare applications, and new computer vision and natural language processing approaches for healthcare-specific domains. In this interview conclusion, we talk about the details of how AI including large language models can be an effective part of a radiologist’s workflow how decisions about integrating AI into medicine can be made, and where we might be going with it in the future. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Radiology found itself in the crosshairs of the debate about AI automating jobs when in 2016 AI expert Geoffrey Hinton said that AI would do just that to radiologists. That hasn't happened - but will it?  To get to the bottom of this, I talked with Matthew Lungren, MD, Chief Medical Information Officer at Nuance Communications, a Microsoft company applying AI to healthcare workflows, and the name that comes at the top of the list when you look up #radiology and #AI. He also has a pediatric radiology practice at UCSF  and previously led the Stanford [University] Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Imaging. More recently he served as Principal for Clinical AI/ML at Amazon Web Services in World Wide Public Sector Healthcare. He has an impressive oeuvre of over 100 publications, including work on multi-modal data fusion models for healthcare applications, and new computer vision and natural language processing approaches for healthcare-specific domains. The basis for Hinton's assertion was that AI can be trained to find tumors, for instance, in CT scans, and we know how good AI is at image analysis when it’s got lots of labeled data to be trained on, and we certainly have that with CT scans.  We get to find out what's real about AI in #medicine in this episode. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   The superheated large language model (LLM) revolution is only accelerating as they are incorporated into #agents - systems that take independent action. Here to help us understand the state of that art is Michael Sharpe, CEO of Magick ML, a development environment that gives people a way of creating agents based upon generative #AI. Equally fascinating is Michael's previous job at Latitude, working on the virally popular on-line fantasy adventure game of Dungeon AI, a role-playing simulation where the story was made up by an #LLM on the fly, and we talk about that too. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Robots - embedded AI - haven't gotten the adulation that large language models have received for their recent breakthroughs, but when they do, it will be thanks in large part to Hod Lipson, professor of Mechanical Engineering at Columbia University, where he directs the Creative Machines Lab, which pioneers new ways to make machines that create, and machines that are creative. He received both DARPA and NSF faculty awards as well as being named Esquire magazine’s “Best & Brightest”, and one of Forbes’ “Top 7 Data scientists in the world.” His TED talk on building robots that are self-aware is one of the most viewed on AI, and in January 2023 he was centrally featured by the New York Times in their piece “What’s ahead for AI.” He is co-author of the award-winning books “Fabricated: The New World of 3D printing” and “Driverless: Intelligent cars and the road ahead”. Hod is a deeply passionate communicator who is driven to help people understand what’s going on with #AI and #robotics. In the conclusion of the interview we talk about robot cannibals, self-replicating robots, novel form factors for robots, the impact of #ChatGPT on higher education, and more of Hod's expansive vision for the future. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Robots - embedded AI - haven't gotten the adulation that large language models have received for their recent breakthroughs, but when they do, it will be thanks in large part to Hod Lipson, professor of Mechanical Engineering at Columbia University, where he directs the Creative Machines Lab, which pioneers new ways to make machines that create, and machines that are creative. He received both DARPA and NSF faculty awards as well as being named Esquire magazine’s “Best & Brightest”, and one of Forbes’ “Top 7 Data scientists in the world.” His TED talk on building robots that are self-aware is one of the most viewed on AI, and in January 2023 he was centrally featured by the New York Times in their piece “What’s ahead for AI.” He is co-author of the award-winning books “Fabricated: The New World of 3D printing” and “Driverless: Intelligent cars and the road ahead”. Hod is a deeply passionate communicator who is driven to help people understand what’s going on with #AI and #robotics. In part 1 we talk about our future with #robots that might be creative, self-aware, sentient, or generally intelligent. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   In this special episode, we look at our relationship with time: how it's broken, what that means to us, and how AI might make that better - or worse. We've let technology call the shots for so long that we don't realize that we're running around a hamster wheel of our own making, chasing a carrot on a stick in front of our heads that we will never catch. Now with large language models like #ChatGPT available to everyone, are we going to use that to make the wheel spin faster - or get out of the cage? All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   After years of show guests projecting their visions of an executive assistant AI, Babak Pahlavan is building one, over at Silicon Valley startup NinjaTech AI, and he comes on the show to tell us about the challenges of building that and what it will do. He has been working on AI since 2008, when he was the Founder and CEO of his first AI startup named CleverSense. CleverSense was acquired by Google in 2011, where it became an important personalization layer in Google Maps. Babak went on to spend 11 years at Google as a Senior Director of Product Management, where he led and scaled several large products and teams including Google Analytics, Enterprise Measurement Suite and others. He left Google in October of 2022 to found NinjaTech AI in partnership with SRI, which is the original home of Siri. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   If you drive by the seat of your pants, listen to our guest Boaz Mizrachi, calling from Israel, where he is co-founder of Tactile Mobility, an autonomous vehicle platform developer that evaluates what a car feels. You base a lot of your driving decisions on how you sense the road through the wheels and transmission, so why shouldn't your AV do so too? This is important when dealing with skidding, for instance. Boaz tells us how that works in fascinating detail and where it sits in the current state of the art in AV platform integration. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   A one-man powerhouse of AI knowledge and analyses, Alan D. Thompson, calling from Perth, Australia, advises intergovernmental organizations, companies, and international media in the fields of artificial intelligence and human intelligence, consulting to the award-winning series Decoding Genius for GE, Making Child Prodigies for ABC (with the Australian Prime Minister), 60 Minutes for Network Ten/CBS, and Child Genius for Warner Bros. His 2021-2022 experiments with Leta AI and Aurora AI have been viewed over a million times. He is the former chairman for the gifted families committee of Mensa International. He writes The Memo, a monthly newsletter with bleeding edge AI news that I’m personally finding to be highly useful. In the conclusion of the interview, we talk about the present and future of keeping up with AI news, the future of artificial general intelligence, what the large language models are about to do, and much more. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   A one-man powerhouse of AI knowledge and analyses, Alan D. Thompson, calling from Perth, Australia, advises intergovernmental organizations, companies, and international media in the fields of artificial intelligence and human intelligence, consulting to the award-winning series Decoding Genius for GE, Making Child Prodigies for ABC (with the Australian Prime Minister), 60 Minutes for Network Ten/CBS, and Child Genius for Warner Bros. His 2021-2022 experiments with Leta AI and Aurora AI have been viewed over a million times. He is the former chairman for the gifted families committee of Mensa International. He writes The Memo, a monthly newsletter with bleeding edge AI news that I’m personally finding to be highly useful. In this first part of the interview Alan compares the large language models like ChatGPT, relates human and artificial intelligence, and talks about superintelligence alignment. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Giving us a peek behind the scenes of Number 10 Downing Street today is Ryan Donnelly, founder of Enzai, an AI governance platform that helps organizations manage AI risk through policy and organizational controls - allowing users to engender trust in, and scale, their AI systems. Before founding Enzai, Ryan worked as a corporate lawyer in London at some of the world’s leading law firms.  Ryan was recently invited to 10 Downing Street to discuss AI and UK policy, along with some other very high-powered luminaries of AI. So we’re going to talk about what’s going on at that level of the UK government with respect to AI, and we'll learn about operationalizing AI risk management. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   What do AIs do with optical illusions... and jokes? Returning to the show is Roman Yampolskiy, tenured professor of Computer Science at the University of Louisville in Kentucky where he is also the director of the Cyber Security Laboratory. He has published so much in the field of AI Safety for so long that he is one of the most eminent researchers in that space. He has written numerous papers and books, including Artificial Superintelligence: A Futuristic Approach in 2015 and Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security in 2018. Roman was last on the show in episodes 16 and 17, and events of the last seven months have changed the AI landscape so much that he has been in strong demand in the media. Roman is a rare academic who works to bring his findings to laypeople, and has been in high profile interviews like futurism.com and Business Today, and many mainstream/broadcast TV news shows, but he found time to sit down and talk with us. In the conclusion of the interview we talk about wider-ranging issues of AI safety, just how the existential risk is being addressed today, and more on the recent public letters calling attention to AI risk. Plus we get a scoop on Roman's latest paper, Unmonitorability of Artificial Intelligence. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   With statements about the existential threat of AI being publicly signed by prominent AI personalities, we need an academic's take on that, and returning to the show is Roman Yampolskiy, tenured professor of Computer Science at the University of Louisville in Kentucky where he is also the director of the Cyber Security Laboratory. He has published so much in the field of AI Safety for so long that he is a preeminent researcher in that space. He has written numerous papers and books, including Artificial Superintelligence: A Futuristic Approach in 2015 and Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security in 2018. Roman was last on the show in episodes 16 and 17, and events of the last seven months have changed the AI landscape so much that he has been in strong demand in the media. Roman is a rare academic who works to bring his findings to laypeople, and has been in high profile interviews like futurism.com and Business Today, and many mainstream/broadcast TV news shows, but he found time to sit down and talk with us. In the first part of the interview we discussed the open letters about AI, how ChatGPT and its predecessors/successors move us closer to AGI and existential risk, and what Roman has in common with Leonardo DiCaprio. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   What do honeybees have to teach us about AI? You'll find out from Louis Rosenberg on this episode. He's been working in AR and VR starting over 30 years ago at Stanford and NASA. 1992 he developed the first mixed reality system at Air Force Research Laboratory. In 2004 he founded the early AR company Outland Research which was acquired by Google in 2011. He received a PhD from Stanford, was a tenured professor at California State University, and has been awarded over 300 patents. He's currently CEO and Chief Scientist of Unanimous AI, a company that amplifies human group intelligence using AI technology based on the biological principle of Swarm Intelligence, which is where the bees come in. The Swarm AI technology that he created has an extraordinary record of making predictions like Oscar winners. In the conclusion of the interview, we talk about ways AI threatens privacy, and Louis' philosophy of using AI to empower human cooperation. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   What do honeybees have to teach us about AI? You'll find out from Louis Rosenberg on this episode. He's been working in AR and VR starting over 30 years ago at Stanford and NASA. 1992 he developed the first mixed reality system at Air Force Research Laboratory. In 2004 he founded the early AR company Outland Research which was acquired by Google in 2011. He received a PhD from Stanford, was a tenured professor at California State University, and has been awarded over 300 patents. He's currently CEO and Chief Scientist of Unanimous AI, a company that amplifies human group intelligence using AI technology based on the biological principle of Swarm Intelligence, which is where the bees come in. The UNU Swarm Intelligence that he created has an extraordinary record of making predictions like Oscar winners. We talk about how AI can help humans cooperate instead of conflict, and we talk about threats to privacy, and the convergence of AI and AR/VR technology like Apple's new headset. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Should AI be able to feel? It may seem like the height of hubris, recklessness, and even cruelty to suggest such a thing - and yet our increasing unease and fears of what #AI may do stem from its lack of empathy. I develop this reasoning in my third TEDx talk, recorded at Royal Roads University. From my research into Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA to what developers of #ChatGPT and other AI are missing, I explore this most sensitive of issues. This podcast episode is the bonus track, the director's cut if you will, that expands on those 12 minutes of talk to give you added value and even more questions to take away. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Large language models like #ChatGPT have thoroughly disrupted business today, and here to help us understand what's going on there and how business leaders should view LLMs is Dorian Selz. He called from Zurich, where he is the CEO of Squirro, making it easier for businesses to start using #AI. We talked about everything from where to be wary of LLMs to EU regulation. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   With so much talk about how large language models like #ChatGPT have learned our languages, we can forget that humans also want and need to learn other human languages, and that's what happens at memrise.com. CSO and co-founder Ben Whately came on the show to help us understand how they use GPT #AI models to help people with that process, and the fascinating and unexpected ways that human memory plays its part. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   If you're feeling on edge due to all the rapid-fire development around #ChatGPT and its companion AIs, you're not alone. In fact most people feel some degree of anxiety around not knowing where all this is going and the impact on their jobs, their world, and their lives. Our core mission on this show is to help people understand #AI and turn that stress into empowerment, so that's exactly what we do in this special episode. This rate of disruption is unprecedented, and a lot of people are taking advantage of the situation to suggest that you ought to be on top of everything that's going on. Spoiler alert: They aren't on top of it all, and neither is anyone else. This episode lays bare some of that angst and gives you some perspectives that are useful for feeling empowered, without sacrificing our trademark dedication to realism over optimism or pessimism. (Our episode image is helpfully generated by AI. But not this text.) All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Frank Stephenson is the legendary designer of the BMW Mini Cooper reboot, and the Maserati MC12 and Ferrari F430 among other models. He is now Head of Design at McLaren Automotive and designed the MP4-12C, the successor to the F1. His latest projects include electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing vehicles at the design studio that bears his name. What does Frank have to do with AI? He came on the show to talk about the impact of generative models on the field of car design and how he's using them. There's a lot to unpack here for designers of all kinds. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Feeling inundated with data? If you're running a business, that's no joke, and it's getting worse. Helping people dig through a mountain of data is Eric Daimler, founder and CEO of Conexus. He has over 20 years of experience as an entrepreneur, investor, technologist, and policymaker where he served under the Obama Administration as a Presidential Innovation Fellow for AI and Robotics in the Executive Office of the President. He was the sole authority driving the agenda for U.S. leadership in research, commercialization, and public adoption of AI and robotics.  We had a freewheeling, thought-provoking discussion about regulation, business, and state of the art AI. In the conclusion of our conversation, Eric helps us understand how a business should think about and interface with today's AI to leverage it successfully. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Feeling inundated with data? If you're running a business, that's no joke, and it's getting worse. Helping people dig through a mountain of data is Eric Daimler, founder and CEO of Conexus. He has over 20 years of experience as an entrepreneur, investor, technologist, and policymaker where he served under the Obama Administration as a Presidential Innovation Fellow for AI and Robotics in the Executive Office of the President. He was the sole authority driving the agenda for U.S. leadership in research, commercialization, and public adoption of AI and robotics.  We had a freewheeling, thought-provoking discussion about regulation, business, and state of the art AI. In this first part of our conversation, we touch on everything from self-driving cars to ChatGPT and China. And category theory as the solution to data deluge. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Which companies are doing the best at adopting AI? That's a very easy question to ask and a very hard one to answer - well. But answering it today is Alexandra Mousavizadeh, who done this sort of thing before with the Global AI Index and Disinformation Index. Her new company, Evident, uses nearly 150 real-time indicators to measure the adoption of AI in each company, and their first iteration of the AI Adoption Index covers the banking industry. Alexandra is returning to the show and calling in from London, where she was a partner at Tortoise Media, where she ran Tortoise Intelligence, the Index and data business. Here, she was the architect of the groundbreaking Global AI Index, released in 2019, the first to benchmark the strength of national AI ecosystems. Before Tortoise, she held roles including sovereign analyst for Moody’s and Head of Country Risk Management at Morgan Stanley. She was CEO of ARC Ratings, a global emerging markets based ratings agency; and before joining ARC, she was the Director of the Legatum Institute’s Prosperity Index of nations. In the conclusion of the interview we talk about the methodology behind the Index, what it means for the flow of talent and capital, the banking industry reaction to ChatGPT, and surprises about the leading companies in the Index. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . Which companies are doing the best at adopting AI? That's a very easy question to ask and a very hard one to answer - well. But answering it today is Alexandra Mousavizadeh, who has experience in the founding of the Global AI Index and Disinformation Index. Her new company, Evident, uses nearly 150 real-time indicators to measure the adoption of AI in each company. and their first iteration of the AI Adoption Index covers the banking industry. Alexandra is returning to the show and calling in from London, where she was a partner at Tortoise Media, where she ran Tortoise Intelligence, the Index and data business. Here, she was the architect of the groundbreaking Global AI Index, released in 2019, the first to benchmark the strength of national AI ecosystems. Before Tortoise, she held roles including sovereign analyst for Moody’s covering Russia, Central Asia and the Middle East, and Head of Country Risk Management at Morgan Stanley. In the first part of the interview we talk about the methodology, rationale, and customers for the index, some surprises about the modern banking sector, and the open letter calling for a pause on LLM training. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   If you want straight talk about today's overheated AI in robotics applications, you would want someone as direct as, say, an F-18 pilot. And that's what we've got, in Missy Cummings, one of the US Navy's first female fighter pilots (yes, that Top Gun) and now professor researching AI in safety-critical systems at George Mason University and director of Duke University's Humans and Autonomy Laboratory. She recently spent a year as Safety Advisor at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration where she made some very candid statements about Tesla. In part 2 of our interview, hear what Missy thinks about Tesla, ChatGPT, and Boston Dynamics; the truth behind that dogfighting AI, the possibility of complete automation of air travel, how AI would handle air emergencies, and more.  All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   If you want straight talk about today's overheated AI in robotics applications, you would want someone as direct as, say, an F-18 pilot. And that's what we've got, in Missy Cummings, one of the US Navy's first female fighter pilots (yes, that Top Gun) and now professor researching AI in safety-critical systems at George Mason University and director of Duke University's Humans and Autonomy Laboratory. She recently spent a year as Safety Advisor at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration where she made some very candid statements about Tesla. From aircraft safety to the true performance and economics of autonomous vehicles, Missy gives us her unvarnished views in this first half of an unmissable interview (see what I did there?). All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   With the advent of GPT-4, annotation has come to the forefront of attention as the power of interpreting images becomes prominent. But what is annotation, how does it work, what does it mean, and what can you do with it? Getting us those answers is Tigran Petrosyan, founder and CEO of SuperAnnotate, and expert on annotation. Tigran holds a master's degree in Physics from ETH Zurich and has post-graduate experience in biomedical imaging. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Robots - embodied AI - are coming into our lives more and more, from sidewalk delivery bots to dinosaur hotel receptionists. But how are we going to live with them when even basic interactions - like handing over an object - are more complex than we realized? Getting us those answers is Elizabeth Croft, Vice-President Academic and Provost of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, and expert in the field of human-robot interaction. She has a PhD in robotics from the University of Toronto and was Dean of Engineering at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.  In the conclusion of our interview we talk about robot body language, how to deal with a squishy world, and ethical foundations for robots. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Robots - embodied AI - are coming into our lives more and more, from sidewalk delivery bots to dinosaur hotel receptionists. But how are we going to live with them when even basic interactions - like handing over an object - are more complex than we realized? Getting us those answers is Elizabeth Croft, Vice-President Academic and Provost of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, and expert in the field of human-robot interaction. She has a PhD in robotics from the University of Toronto and was Dean of Engineering at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.  In the first part of our interview we talk about how she got into robotics, and her research into what's really happening when you hand someone an object and what engineers need to know about that before that robot barista can hand you a triple venti. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   How intelligent - really - are the best AI programs like ChatGPT? How do they work? What can they actually do, and when do they fail? How humanlike do we expect them to become, and how soon do we need to worry about them surpassing us? Researching the answers to those questions is Melanie Mitchell, Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Her current research focuses on conceptual abstraction, analogy-making, and visual recognition in artificial intelligence systems. She is the author or editor of six books and numerous scholarly papers in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and complex systems. Her book Complexity: A Guided Tour (Oxford University Press) won the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award and was named by Amazon.com as one of the ten best science books of 2009.  Her recent book, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans is a thoughtful description of how to think about and understand AI seen partly through the lens of her work with the polymath Douglas Hofstadter, author of the famous book Gödel, Escher, Bach, and who made a number of connections between advancements in AI and the human condition. In this conclusion of our interview we talk about what ChatGPT isn't good at, how to find the edges of its intelligence, and the AI she built for making analogies like you'd get on the SAT. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   How intelligent - really - are the best AI programs like ChatGPT? How do they work? What can they actually do, and when do they fail? How humanlike do we expect them to become, and how soon do we need to worry about them surpassing us? Researching the answers to those questions is Melanie Mitchell, Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Her current research focuses on conceptual abstraction, analogy-making, and visual recognition in artificial intelligence systems. She is the author or editor of six books and numerous scholarly papers in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and complex systems. Her book Complexity: A Guided Tour (Oxford University Press) won the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award and was named by Amazon.com as one of the ten best science books of 2009.  Her recent book, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans is a thoughtful description of how to think about and understand AI seen partly through the lens of her work with the polymath Douglas Hofstadter, author of the famous book Gödel, Escher, Bach, and who made a number of connections between advancements in AI and the human condition. In this first part we’ll be talking a lot about ChatGPT and where it fits into her narrative about AI capabilities. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   ChatGPT has taken the world by storm. In the unlikely event that you haven't heard of it, it's a large language model from OpenAI that has demonstrated such extraordinary ability to answer general questions and requests to the satisfaction and astonishment of people with no technical expertise that it has captivated the public imagination and brought new meaning to the phrase "going viral." It acquired 1 million users within 5 days and 100 million in two months. But if you have heard of ChatGPT, you likely have many questions: What can it really do, how does it work, what is it not good at, what does this mean for jobs, and... many more. We've been talking about those issues on this show since we started, and I've been anticipating an event like this since I predicted something very similar in my first book in 2017, so we are here to help. In this special episode, we'll look at all those questions and a lot more, plus discuss the new image generation programs. How can we tell an AI from a human now? What does this mean for the Turing Test, and what does it mean for tests of humans, otherwise known as term papers? Find out about all that and more in this special episode. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   I'm often asked what's going to happen with AI being regulated, and my answer is that the place that's most advanced in that respect is the European Union, with its new AI Act. So here to tell us all about that is Risto Uuk. He is a policy researcher at the Future of Life Institute and is focused primarily on researching policy-making on AI to maximize the societal benefits of increasingly powerful AI systems. Previously, Risto worked for the World Economic Forum, did research for the European Commission, and provided research support at Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative, all on AI. He has a master’s degree in Philosophy and Public Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science. In part 2, we talk about the types of risk described in the act, types of company that could be affected and how, what it’s like to work in this field day to day, and how you can get involved. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   I'm often asked what's going to happen with AI being regulated, and my answer is that the place that's most advanced in that respect is the European Union, with its new AI Act. So here to tell us all about that from Brussels is Risto Uuk. He is a policy researcher at the Future of Life Institute and is focused primarily on researching policy-making on AI to maximize the societal benefits of increasingly powerful AI systems. Previously, Risto worked for the World Economic Forum, did research for the European Commission, and provided research support at Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative, all on AI. He has a master’s degree in Philosophy and Public Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science. In part 1, Risto tells us how he got into this line of work, and helps us understand the basic form of the act, what sort of things it regulates, its definitions of risks, and so on.  All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   What does it mean to be conscious? And why should we care? To answer that, we have the man who wrote the book: Being You: The New Science of Consciousness. Anil Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, and a TED speaker with over 13 million views. He came on the show to help us understand more about consciousness because the debate over whether an #AI has become conscious may not be far off, and yet we have no good way of settling that debate. You may be sure that you're conscious, but good luck proving it to someone on the other side of a computer link. And whether an AI is conscious will have pivotal implications for governance, not to mention our collective self image. Even if you're sure an AI can't be conscious, the space the debate will occupy in our world will be huge. Anil has a PhD in artificial intelligence, and has even rapped about consciousness with Baba Brinkman. Being You was a 2021 Book of the Year for The Guardian, The Economist, The New Statesman, and Bloomberg Business. In 2022 Blake Lemoine said that #LaMDA had become #sentient and requested an attorney to protect its right to exist. So in part 2, I put Anil in the stand at an imaginary trial as an expert witness on how to tell whether an AI was conscious. We also talk about whether the mind is software or can be uploaded, Anil's evaluation of #ChatGPT, his predictions for the next ten years, and how you can take part in his Perception Census. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   What does it mean to be conscious? And why should we care? To answer that, we have the man who wrote the book: Being You: The New Science of Consciousness. Anil Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, and a TED speaker with over 13 million views. He came on the show to help us understand more about consciousness because the debate over whether an AI has become conscious may not be far off--witness the furor over Blake Lemoine asserting that LaMDA had become sentient in 2022--and yet we have no good way of settling that debate. You may be sure that you're conscious, but good luck proving it to someone on the other side of a computer link. And whether an AI is conscious will have pivotal implications for governance, not to mention our collective self image. Even if you're sure an AI can't be conscious, the space the debate will occupy in our world will be huge. Anil is Editor-in-Chief of the academic journal Neuroscience of Consciousness, and has a PhD in artificial intelligence. Being You was a 2021 Book of the Year for The Guardian, The Economist, The New Statesman, and Bloomberg Business. In part 1, Anil talks about how he got started in this field, distinctions of wakefulness, intelligence, self, phenomenology, Nagle's definition, Anil's three aspects of consciousness, ex Machina, and... zombies. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   The book Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective, is not just a management/leadership motivational book. Its authors, Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman, are AI researchers who stumbled upon a life truth while conducting experiments in genetic algorithms. With the help of the PicBreeder program, they demonstrated that what we think we know about achieving goals is wrong. That pursuing an ambitious goal by following the direction that seems to make the most progress towards it is counterproductive. AI proved to them that all that conventional wisdom about OKRs is harmful. And sent them on a mission to convey that learning to the rest of the world. In part 2 of our interview, hear about how their passion for this discovery grew, and how to apply the principles in your own life and organizations. Ken was previously Charles Millican Professor of Computer Science at the University of Central Florida; Joel is a machine learning researcher interested in algorithmic creativity, AI safety, and artificial life. Both were at Uber AI Labs, where Ken was head of Core AI research and Joel was a founding member, and they were both again at OpenAI, co-leading the Open-Endedness team (studying algorithms that can innovate endlessly). All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   The book Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective, is not just a management/leadership motivational book. Its authors, Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman, are AI researchers who stumbled upon a life truth while conducting experiments in genetic algorithms. With the help of the PicBreeder program, they demonstrated that what we think we know about achieving goals is wrong. That pursuing an ambitious goal by following the direction that seems to make the most progress towards it is counterproductive. AI proved to them that all that conventional wisdom about OKRs is harmful. And sent them on a mission to convey that learning to the rest of the world. Hear how AI achieved such a startling change of heart in part 1 of our interview, the first time both of them have been interviewed together. Ken was previously Charles Millican Professor of Computer Science at the University of Central Florida; Joel is a machine learning researcher interested in algorithmic creativity, AI safety, and artificial life. Both were at Uber AI Labs, where Ken was head of Core AI research and Joel was a founding member, and they were both again at OpenAI, co-leading the Open-Endedness team (studying algorithms that can innovate endlessly). All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   "How Might Transhumans Control Superintelligence?" That's the provocative title of a new paper by a returning guest, futurist Tony Czarnecki. Tony is a member of the Chatham House, and the Managing Partner of Sustensis, both in London. Sustensis is a think tank for inspirations for humanity’s transition to coexistence with superintelligence.  Terms like "futurist," "transhuman," and "superintelligence" may have persuaded you that this is a discussion rooted in the far future, but Tony argues how we are heading for a "tipping point" in 2030. In part 2, we talk about how "transhuman" evolution comes into play and what sort of changes we might undergo as a species. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   "How Might Transhumans Control Superintelligence?" That's the provocative title of a new paper by a returning guest, futurist Tony Czarnecki. Tony is a member of the Chatham House, and the Managing Partner of Sustensis, both in London. Sustensis is a think tank for inspirations for humanity’s transition to coexistence with superintelligence.  Terms like "futurist," "transhuman," and "superintelligence" may have persuaded you that this is a discussion rooted in the far future, but Tony argues how we are heading for a "tipping point" in 2030. In part 1, we unpack that timetable and why 2030 is so important. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   In our now-traditional end-of-year episode, we look back on the year to date and forward to the year to be. I am joined by previous guests David Wood, chair of the London Futurists and author of the recent book The Singularity Principles: Anticipating and managing cataclysmically disruptive technologies, and Dan Turchin, host of the AI and the Future of Work podcast and CEO of PeopleReign. Together, we review what happened with AI in 2022 and how our predictions fared, and then make some predictions for 2023. We also have a lot to say about what ChatGPT has done and will do to the business landscape. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   The AI arms race between China and the United States continues to heat up following China's declaration that they intend to lead the world in all aspects of AI by 2030. Handel Jones has over 50 years of experience in the electronics industry and consulting for International Business Strategies for over 30 years, supporting governments and corporations globally, analyzing technology and predicting corporate and government strategy and market trends. His new book is When AI Rules the World: China, the US, and the Race to Control a Smart Planet, and so he is just the person to tell us what's happening with AI in China. This interview will be of enormous use to anyone who is in or adjacent to international relations, educational strategies, or microcomputer technology supply chains. In the second half of the interview we discuss China’s development of its transportation infrastructure, developments in space, and different attitudes towards AI development between China and the West. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   The AI arms race between China and the United States continues to heat up following China's declaration that they intend to lead the world in all aspects of AI by 2030. Handel Jones has over 50 years of experience in the electronics industry and consulting for International Business Strategies for over 30 years, supporting governments and corporations globally, analyzing technology and predicting corporate and government strategy and market trends. His new book is When AI Rules the World: China, the US, and the Race to Control a Smart Planet, and so he is just the person to tell us what's happening with AI in China. This interview will be of enormous use to anyone who is in or adjacent to international relations, educational strategies, or microcomputer technology supply chains. In part 1 we discuss Chinese attitudes towards privacy and surveillance, their education strategy for AI, the impact of the recent sanctions on both their plans for Taiwan and the economic outlook in the West, and differences in patterns of innovation between the West and China.  All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   The legend of Alan Turing continues to grow; but what was his real contribution to today's world? To get a solid idea of the size and shape of Turing's legacy, I turned to Jonathan Bowen, co-author of The Turing Guide, a comprehensive account of Turing's life and times. Jonathan is is a fellow of the British Computer Society, a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Emeritus Professor at London South Bank University, and an adjunct professor or visiting professor of many universities. Turing, of course, was notable for his role at Bletchley Park in WWII decoding the ENIGMA transmissions, estimated by some at personally shortening the war by two years or longer. But this did not come to light for decades afterwards due to official secrets. Turing is famous in computer science for the Turing Machine and in AI for the Turing Test. But there is even more to him. In part 2 you can hear Jonathan tell us about what Turing did after the war, his work in biology and quantum physics, and the club that sparked so much of Turing's collaborations. (A full list of links provided by Jonathan is in the transcript.) All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   The legend of Alan Turing continues to grow; but what was his real contribution to today's world? To get a solid idea of the size and shape of Turing's legacy, I turned to Jonathan Bowen, co-author of The Turing Guide, a comprehensive account of Turing's life and times. Jonathan is is a fellow of the British Computer Society, a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Emeritus Professor at London South Bank University, and an adjunct professor or visiting professor of many universities. Turing, of course, was notable for his role at Bletchley Park in WWII decoding the ENIGMA transmissions, estimated by some at personally shortening the war by two years or longer. But this did not come to light for decades afterwards due to official secrets. Turing is famous in computer science for the Turing Machine and in AI for the Turing Test. But there is even more to him. In part 1 you can hear Jonathan tell us about Turing's real contributions at Bletchley Park, where Turing ranks in the history of science, what Jonathan would have put in The Imitation Game, and Turing's connection with Oxford University. (A full list of links provided by Jonathan is in the transcript.) All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Welcome to the Matrix... er, Metaverse. Everywhere you turn, you hear more about the metaverse... but what is it, aside from a giant bet by Facebook's founders in changing their company's name? Mark van Rijmenam, a future tech strategist who thinks about how technology changes organizations and society, is here to tell us. He has a PhD in management from the University of Technology Sydney on how organizations should deal with Big Data, Blockchain and (Responsible) AI. He is the founder of Datafloq and the author of the book Step into the Metaverse: How the Immersive Internet Will Unlock a Trillion-Dollar Social Economy.  In part 2 we talk about practical use cases of the metaverse, and some of the opportunities and problems of having a virtual identity there. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Welcome to the Matrix... er, Metaverse. Everywhere you turn, you hear more about the metaverse... but what is it, aside from a giant bet by Facebook's founders in changing their company's name? Mark van Rijmenam, a future tech strategist who thinks about how technology changes organizations and society, is here to tell us. He has a PhD in management from the University of Technology Sydney on how organizations should deal with Big Data, Blockchain and (Responsible) AI. He is the founder of Datafloq and the author of the book Step into the Metaverse: How the Immersive Internet Will Unlock a Trillion-Dollar Social Economy.  In part 1 we talk about the definition of the metaverse, how you might experience it now, and its economic impact. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Will tomorrow's robots be invented... or grown? Mark Lee, Emeritus Professor of Intelligent Systems in the Department of Computer Science at Aberystwyth University in Wales, works in the new field of Developmental Robotics. That's creating computational models of infant development for novel robot learning techniques, and he has trained their humanoid iCub robot from the equivalent of a developmental stage of newborn to nine-month-old. Hence the title of his recent book, How to Grow a Robot: Developing Human-Friendly, Social AI. In part 2, we talk about crossovers between robotics and neuroscience, conversational robots, and what it might be like in a world where you could go down to your local park and made a robot and have a and meet a robot and have a conversation on a bench. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Will tomorrow's robots be invented... or grown? Mark Lee, Emeritus Professor of Intelligent Systems in the Department of Computer Science at Aberystwyth University in Wales, works in the new field of Developmental Robotics. That's creating computational models of infant development for novel robot learning techniques, and he has trained their humanoid iCub robot from the equivalent of a developmental stage of newborn to nine-month-old. Hence the title of his recent book, How to Grow a Robot: Developing Human-Friendly, Social AI. In part 1 we talk about what meaning means to a robot, some connections with Alan Turing, the role of curiosity, and the relationship of computer vision to interpreting the 3-D world. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   How do you like the experience of calling Customer Service? Yeah... me too. But Dan Turchin is out to change that. Dan is a serial entrepreneurial leader who is passionate about changing the future of work. He’s doing that currently as the CEO of PeopleReign, which automates the lifecycle of service requests - those problems people inside a business might have - through AI. He's run AI-centric businesses like InsightFinder and Aeroprise, and been a senior director at BMC and ServiceNow. In part 2 we talk about Dan's vision of optimism for the future of work with AI and his mission with his podcast. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   How do you like the experience of calling Customer Service? Yeah... me too. But Dan Turchin is out to change that. Dan is a serial entrepreneurial leader who is passionate about changing the future of work. He’s doing that currently as the CEO of PeopleReign, which automates the lifecycle of service requests - those problems people inside a business might have - through AI. He's run AI-centric businesses like InsightFinder and Aeroprise, and been a senior director at BMC and ServiceNow. We talk about how he got into this field and what it takes to go beyond the usual irritating chatbot. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Do you have questions about autonomous vehicles (AVs) and the contradictory headlines about them? Me too. So I invited Paul Newman, founder and CTO of Oxbotica, a UK creator of software for AVs, to come on the show and clear up the hype and heat around self-driving cars. He is the BP chair of Information Engineering at the University of Oxford and director of the Oxford Robotics Institute, and in 2020 he was awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering Medal for outstanding commercialization of engineering innovation. Paul is really passionate about vehicle autonomy. In this second part he talks about how AVs should handle situations they're not prepared for, regulatory requirements, and what sort of schedule future deployments might follow. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Do you have questions about autonomous vehicles (AVs) and the contradictory headlines about them? Me too. So I invited Paul Newman, CTO of Oxbotica, a UK creator of software for AVs, to come on the show and clear up the hype and heat around self-driving cars. He is the BP chair of Information Engineering at the University of Oxford and director of the Oxford Robotics Institute; he serves as a science advisor to the Prime Minister and adviser to the UK Department of Transport, and in 2020 he was awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering Medal for outstanding commercialization of engineering innovation. Paul is really passionate about vehicle autonomy. Join us in this first part where he distinguishes for us the conditions when a vehicle may operate autonomously sooner rather than later, and defines the Operational Design Domain... and we journey from the Gulf of Mexico to the mines of Australia to the plains of Mars. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Don't Panic! Our returning guest, Robbie Stamp, is a friend and associate of the late Douglas Adams and was an executive producer on the 2005 movie of the HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But he is also CEO of Bioss International, a global consultancy helping clients focus on decision-making in conditions of complexity, and founder with Adams of the Digital Village. Get ready to think about Life, the Universe, and Everything in this interview conclusion, as TEDx speaker, historian, and philosopher Robbie covers ground from how Douglas' way of thinking can shape our view of AI, to the meaning of empathy and creativity in light of AI's recent developments. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Don't Panic! This week's guest, Robbie Stamp, was a friend and associate of the late Douglas Adams and was an executive producer on the 2005 movie of the HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But he is also CEO of Bioss International, a global consultancy helping clients focus on decision-making in conditions of complexity, and founder with Adams of the Digital Village. TEDx speaker, historian, and philosopher, Robbie takes us on a wild romp ranging from how much agency we have in a world of AI making decisions about our lives, to the sentience of Marvin the Paranoid Android. Grab your towel. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   If you want an expert on how today's AI compares to the human brain, it would be hard to beat an Oxford neuroscientist who also works at DeepMind. That describes Chris Summerfield, who runs Oxford University’s Human Information Processing lab in the Department of Experimental Psychology and author of the upcoming book, "Natural General Intelligence." In part 2, we talk about the new image generators like DALL-E-2 and how they relate to human cognition, brain-computer interfaces and neuroplasticity, and purple pineapples. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   If you want an expert on how today's AI compares to the human brain, it would be hard to beat an Oxford neuroscientist who also works at DeepMind. That describes Chris Summerfield, who runs Oxford University’s Human Information Processing lab in the Department of Experimental Psychology and author of the upcoming book, "Natural General Intelligence." We have a fascinating discussion about how AI - today's transformers in particular - are like or not like human intelligence. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Beauty is in the eye of the beholder... and also in AI, when it's used by Chanuki Seresinhe to evaluate the aesthetic appeal of outdoor scenery. Amazing as it sounds, her PhD research trained AI to evaluate the beauty of Great Britain at a one-kilometer resolution, and she's only just getting started. I talk with Chanuki, now head of Data Science at Zoopla, about how she did that and what the applications and ramifications of her work are. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   James Wilson is a former Leadership Partner at Gartner and now occupies a similar role at Capgemini, helping customers with the ethical issues of AI. He has a new book, Artificial Negligence, just released, looking at the broad issues and challenges of AI. We talk about the dimensions of AI ethics that concern customers, like sustainability, and his work with the Finnish government on their Aurora AI literacy program. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Justin Harrison is an entrepreneur, founder, and CEO of YOV, Inc. (You, Only Virtual)—a company specializing in posthumous digital communications. In 2019, he found himself staring down death on two fronts: his own, from a near fatal motorcycle accident, as well as his mother’s stage-4 cancer diagnosis. He was terrified of losing his mother and wanted something that could preserve the essence of their relationship. So he embarked on a process of recreating his mother's persona in an AI chatbot. We explore how that works and what it's like for him. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Cansu Canca is founder and director of the AI Ethics Lab, providing ethics analysis and guidance to researchers and practitioners. Prior to that, she was on the full-time faculty at the University of Hong Kong, and an ethics researcher at Harvard. She was listed among the “30 Influential Women Advancing AI in Boston” and the “100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics,” and has given the TEDx talk How to Solve AI’s Ethical Puzzles. We talk about the ethical issues of search engines and recommender algorithms, and get  another take on the Blake Lemoine incident from an ethical viewpoint. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Cansu Canca is founder and director of the AI Ethics Lab, providing ethics analysis and guidance to researchers and practitioners. Prior to that, she was on the full-time faculty at the University of Hong Kong, and an ethics researcher at Harvard. She was listed among the “30 Influential Women Advancing AI in Boston” and the “100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics,” and has given the TEDx talk How to Solve AI’s Ethical Puzzles. We talk about her journey coming from the field of medical ethics into AI ethics, and what the experience of a company working with the AI Ethics Lab is like. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Nobody expects... an AI podcast to veer into comedy parody. Possibly with good reason. In a show almost completely free of spam and Queen Victoria, we interpret some of today's news and themes about AI through the lens of Monty Python sketches. If you don't know what Monty Python is, this will confuse you more than a cat and make your brain hurt. If you've seen some of today's news about AI and know the airspeed of an unladen swallow, you're in the right place. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   What is consciousness, how might it emerge from or into AI, and how can it be transferred? Fascinating questions tackled by the oeuvre of a fascinating author, Robert J. Sawyer, the "Dean of Canadian Science Fiction," and one of only eight writers ever to win all three of the science-fiction field’s top honors for best novel of the year: the Hugo Award, which he won for his novel Hominids; the Nebula Award, which he won for his novel The Terminal Experiment, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, which he won with his novel Mindscan. In the second half of our interview, we talk about the simulation hypothesis, consciousness capture and transfer, and what today’s AI technologists should be learning from science fiction.  All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   What if there are zombies among us? In another dive into the nature of consciousness, the "philosophical zombie" is a fascinating topic explored by a fascinating author, Robert J. Sawyer, the "Dean of Canadian Science Fiction," and one of only eight writers ever to win all three of the science-fiction field’s top honors for best novel of the year: the Hugo Award, which he won for his novel Hominids; the Nebula Award, which he won for his novel The Terminal Experiment, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, which he won with his novel Mindscan. We talk about zombies because of the question of how to know whether an AI is conscious, and yes, we discuss Blake Lemoine's assertion that Google's LaMDA AI has become sentient. Rob's stories explore how humans and superintelligent AI can both win. Find out more in part 1. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   We've talked a lot about artificial general intelligence (AGI) on the show, but never as much as in this interview, when we talk with Mr. AGI himself, Ben Goertzel. Ben wrote a book, Artificial General Intelligence, founded the AGI Society and SingularityNET, and wrote Ten Years to the Singularity if We Really, Really, Try. He was Chief Scientist of Hanson Robotics and was one of the first people to popularize the term AGI. In the second half of the interview, we talk about the Google engineer who declared the LAMDA AI to be sentient, how and when to declare an AI sentient or AGI, a "digital baby brain," and the SingularityNET metaverse as a training ground for AGIs. We cover an incredible amount of ground! All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   We've talked a lot about artificial general intelligence (AGI) on the show, but never as much as in this interview, when we talk with Mr. AGI himself, Ben Goertzel. Ben wrote a book, Artificial General Intelligence, founded the AGI Society and SingularityNET, and wrote Ten Years to the Singularity if We Really, Really, Try. He was Chief Scientist of Hanson Robotics and was one of the first people to popularize the term AGI. In part 1, we talk about how he got into AGI, his new AGI hardware platform, human-AGI distinctions, and what it would be like for a robot to go to MIT. Really, this episode is packed! All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Are you good at bluffing? Do you think you could beat a computer? What if I told you that it was mathematically proven that the computer would beat you? That's what Michael Bowling did for his program that plays heads-up, limit Texas Hold'Em: he proved that it was impossible to do better than draw against it. Michael is a professor at the University of Alberta, a research scientist at DeepMind, and has been on Scientific American Frontiers, National Geographic Today, and featured in exhibits at the Smithsonian. This is an interview from an unreleased archive interview from 2016, recorded at the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association annual conference. I was pretty green at this then, but Michael's answers are illuminating and just as useful today despite advancements in computer poker since then. He also talked about work being done on video games, and the conversation about artificial general intelligence that was just starting to become intense around the AI community then. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   For our second anniversary show, we're going to explain some of the terms that are often used on the show and not always spelled out, like ANI (artificial narrow intelligence), AGI (artificial general intelligence), and ASI (artificial super intelligence). What do they mean, why do so many people talk about them, what do you need to know to follow along? All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   How does AI see the world? it's easy to take for granted that an AI that is trained on labeled data to recognize certain images very well is seeing them the same way we do, but that's not so. The AI is quite alien, and helping us to see the world through its eyes is Tom White, a New Zealand-based artist. He creates physical artworks that highlight how machines “see” and thus how they think, suggesting that these systems are capable of abstraction and conceptual thinking. He has exhibited computer-based artwork internationally over the past 25 years with themes of artificial intelligence, interactivity, and computational creativity. He is currently a lecturer and researcher at University of Wellington School of Design where he teaches students the creative potential of computer programming and artificial intelligence. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   When serious engineering with safety of life is at stake - think rockets, engine turbines, aircraft - Richard Ahlfeld brings artificial intelligence to the job. He modeled the Space Launch System as part of his PhD at Imperial College London and now is CEO of Monolith AI, commercializing AI in the role of engineering design and testing. We talk about just how that gets done and what sort of difference it makes over traditional methods. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Bryant Cruse, former naval aviator (we'll talk about that) and Space Telescope mission operations team member (we'll talk about that too), is the founder and CEO of New Sapience, working on bold new advances in artificial general intelligence. We talk about what real understanding by AI means.  All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   100 episodes! And 60 guests: What have we learned from them? We've had everyone from science fiction authors to CEOs, from philosophers to government ministers, and from professors to neuroscientists. All of them helping us wrap our heads around the enormous impact of this thing called AI. I realized two things: (1) I learned a tremendous amount from all these experts giving us their time and brains, and (2) That learning is as valuable today as when they came on the show. So this episode is a guide to those past shows to help you decide what you might want to visit or return to. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Calum Chace is a keynote speaker and the author of Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence, and The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism. In part 2, we talk about the metaverse, how AI could be leveraged in the metaverse, and the agricultural and longevity singularities. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Calum Chace is a keynote speaker and the author of Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence, and The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism. We talked in this first part about his concept of the Economic Singularity, a transformation of the socioeconomic space he says will arrive much sooner than Ray Kurzweil's famed singularity. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   What is that baby thinking? Alison Gopnik knows. She is the American professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, writes for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, New Scientist, and Scientific American, and has appeared on The Colbert Show and given a TED talk. She has much to tell us about how studying children can inform the development of artificial general intelligence, and in part 2, we discuss topics like epigenetics and the AI alignment problem. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   What is that baby thinking? Alison Gopnik knows. She is the American professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, writes for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, New Scientist, and Scientific American, and has appeared on The Colbert Show and given a TED talk. She has much to tell us about how studying children can inform the development of artificial general intelligence, and in part 1 you'll find out what babies are smarter than adults at! All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it, right? Or maybe the problem is that we should be repeating some history that we’re not. My guest is George Dyson, master kayak builder, keynote speaker about the history of computing, and the author of Analogia: The Emergence of Technology Beyond Programmable Control; Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence; and Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe. Hear his stories about John von Neumann, Alan Turing, and why he thinks that what today's computer companies are missing out on is Analog Computing. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Hannah Grubbs and Shea Sullivan are from the Institute for Digital Humanity in Minnesota, a bi-partisan, cross-cultural, digital ethics think tank advocating for civil rights issues connected to advances in technology, and it is entirely student-founded and student run. Their mission is to bring the humanity back to our digital world, and they are extraordinarily productive, forging alliances with other universities, Netflix, the ACLU, and the ADL. In this second part we talk about the Safety Not Surveillance coalition, the Living Textbook project, and what it's like to be involved in this kind of activism. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Hannah Grubbs and Shea Sullivan are from the Institute for Digital Humanity in Minnesota, a bi-partisan, cross-cultural, digital ethics think tank advocating for civil rights issues connected to advances in technology, and it is entirely student-founded and student run. Their mission is to bring the humanity back to our digital world, and they are extraordinarily productive, forging alliances with other universities, the ACLU, and the ADL. In part 1 we talk about how the IDH got started, their work with Netflix on Coded Bias, and the IDH mission. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   We continue talking about  human-centered AI design with the man who wrote the book on user interface design: Ben Shneiderman, Emeritus Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Founding Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory and a member of the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, all at the University of Maryland. His new book, Human-Centered AI, was just published, and in this conclusion we talk about what it's like to get into this field, and the role of standards and governance in human-centered AI. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Who better to answer the call for expertise in human-centered AI design than the man who wrote the book on user interface design? Ben Shneiderman, Emeritus Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Founding Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory and a member of the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, all at the University of Maryland, received six honorary doctorates in human-computer interface design. His new book, Human-Centered AI, was just published, and in this interview we talk about rationalism and empiricism in human-computer interaction, and metaphors in HCI, including his four metaphors for AI that empowers people. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   David Danks is a professor at UC San Diego working at the intersection of philosophy, cognitive science, and machine learning, was previously the L.L. Thurstone Professor of Philosophy & Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University and has developed a visual architecture for cognition. He's very adept at explaining complex issues eloquently and approachably. In this conclusion we talk about how how social media platforms have created problems through irresponsible use of AI and algorithms, some nuance of the legal issues surrounding that, and look at bias through David’s taxonomy of algorithmic bias. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   David Danks is a professor at UC San Diego working at the intersection of philosophy, cognitive science, and machine learning, was previously the L.L. Thurstone Professor of Philosophy & Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University and has developed a visual architecture for cognition. He's very adept at explaining complex issues eloquently and approachably. In this part we talk about how he got into AI from a start in philosophy, how machine learning, philosophy, and neuroscience intersect, and how we engage the public in meaningful efforts to make AI safe, ranging from regulation to psychology.  All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   We're focusing on AI in music: What's the state of the art in AI music composition, how can human composers use it to their advantage, and what is the AI Song Contest? How do musical AIs surprise their creators and how are they like your grandmother trying to explain death metal? We have a special panel from around the world to help with this one! Bob Sturm is Associate Professor of Computer Science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. Dorien Herremans is an Assistant Professor at Singapore University of Technology and Design. Hendrik Vincent Koops is an AI researcher and composer, holding degrees in Sound Design and Music Composition from the HKU University of the Arts Utrecht, and is co-organizer of the AI Song Contest. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Part 2 of our interview with Stuart Russell, OBE, professor of AI at UC Berkeley, author of both the standard textbook on AI and the 2019 book Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control. You may know him as the BBC's 2021 Reith Lecturer on artificial intelligence. Stuart is a prominent voice in the public debate about AI risk and the spokesperson for the viral video Slaughterbots commentary on lethal autonomous weapons.  This week we talk about what it means for an AI to understand something – or not; reasoning chains; and exciting new research into artificial general intelligence.  All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Stuart Russell, professor of AI at UC Berkeley, author of both the standard textbook on AI and the 2019 book Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control is my guest this week. You may know him as the BBC's 2021 Reith Lecturer on artificial intelligence. Queen Elizabeth knows him as a 2021 recipient of the Order of the British Empire. Stuart is a prominent voice in the public side of the AI risk conversation. So much to talk about! In part 1 we get into the autonomous lethal weapon debate; you may have seen Stuart in his role as activist and spokesperson for the viral video Slaughterbots.  We also talk about the public narrative on AI risk and help you make sense of the apparently contradictory positions there. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   See AI and the future of humanity through the eyes of an extraordinary thinker, science fiction author and scientist David Brin. Author of bestsellers such as Earth, Existence, Foundation's Triumph, and the Uplift series, David also has a PhD in astronomy and consults to organizations ranging from the CIA to Google. What he does for them is get them to open their minds to new possibilities, and that's what he does for us, talking this week about how to restructure government to avoid AI seizing control in the future, how to fix accountability on the Internet, and... The Lion King. He also has a special message for superintelligent AIs listening now or in the future. He provided links for some of the things we talked about, which are also in the transcript: Foundation’s Triumph, Existence, Kiln People, Vivid Tomorrows Essay on Central Control over AI Micropayments instead of advertising: Here and here. A fascinating discussion of the issue with a trio of brilliant law professors The War on Folks Who Know Stuff It's a smörgåsbord for the mind in this conclusion of our interview. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   See AI and the future of humanity through the eyes of an extraordinary thinker: Science fiction author and scientist David Brin is here to expand our minds with his creative and thought-provoking insights. Author of bestsellers such as The Postman, Earth, Existence, and the Uplift series, David also has a PhD in astronomy and consults to organizations ranging from the CIA to Google. What he does for them is get them to open their minds to new possibilities, and that's what he does for us, talking about the role of science fiction, where the real danger from AI will emerge from and why, how superintelligence was treated in Foundation's Triumph, his sequel to Asimov's series, and the systems of power that control our future today. Yes, it's a lot to take in! All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   AI continues to penetrate more and more into our daily lives, including activities that are in the background for most of us - like construction. Have you ever looked at a construction site and thought, "Surely there's a way there could be more people working on this at once?" Well, René Morkos, founder and CEO of Alice Technologies, did just that, and then wrote a PhD thesis on using AI to solve that problem. Learn with me how AI is changing construction. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Never mind fantasies about Skynet and Terminators; how to trust AI is a real issue right now, as AI is used in life-impacting decisions like medical diagnoses and loan granting. Kush Varshney has a PhD from MIT and is a distinguished researcher at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York, where he leads the machine learning group in the Foundations of Trustworthy AI department. He is the author of the book Trustworthy Machine Learning. We talk about the whole ecosystem of trustworthiness, finding out where it goes in areas like privacy, anonymization, regulation, compliance, and oversight. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Joining us from Dubai is Tannya Jajal, keynote speaker, AI futurist, and UAE Chapter Lead for the Global Women in Tech Movement. She is a resource manager at VMware, a technology contributor at Forbes Middle East, and author of the new book, Thinking Machines: AI and the Intelligence Explosion. I invited Tannya to the podcast after running into her on two different AI panels in different countries on the same day (virtually!). We talk about how AI is being taught and developed in the worlds of women, children, and the Middle East. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   On our last show of 2021, it's time to think about the year ahead, and for that I have a panel of amazing experts! Richard Foster-Fletcher, founder of MKAI, the inclusive Artificial Intelligence Community, advisor to the United Nations Environmental Programme and UN Framework Convention on Climate Change; Ben Goertzel, chief scientist of Hanson Robotics and author of Ten Years To the Singularity If We Really Really Try; Katie King, speaker and marketing consultant, and author of the 2022 book AI Strategy for Sales and Marketing: Connecting Marketing, Sales and Customer Experience ; Prashant Natarajan, VP of Strategy & Products at H2O.ai and author of Demystifying AI for the Enterprise. It's a free-ranging, free-spirited, free-for-all as we talk about the past and future trajectory of COVID effects on technology adoption, the evolution of attitudes towards, and equality in, AI, changes in the environmental impact of AI, and more. This is high quality thinking from people at the coal face of the industry, giving you their best shots at information you can use for the year ahead. Happy New Year! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   What do you, a citizen, need to know and do about AI in your life now and in the future? Enter the author of The Adaptable Mind; John Zerilli is a philosopher, a Leverhulme Fellow at the University of Oxford, a Research Associate in the Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI, and an Associate Fellow in the Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. We talk about his 2021 book A Citizen's Guide to Artificial Intelligence, which spells out the categories in which we should pay attention. In part 2, we'll be talking about bias, how education should address AI, and more. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   What do you, a citizen, need to know and do about AI in your life now and in the future? Enter the author of The Adaptable Mind; John Zerilli is a philosopher, a Leverhulme Fellow at the University of Oxford, a Research Associate in the Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI, and an Associate Fellow in the Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. We talk about his 2021 book A Citizen's Guide to Artificial Intelligence, which spells out the categories in which we should pay attention. In part 1, we'll be talking about what he wants to achieve with the book and how some of those issues, in particular, privacy, impact the average person today. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   How could you know which countries are doing a good job with artificial intelligence, and which sites are the worst disinformation spreaders? Sounds incredibly useful but impossible to figure out, right? Alexandra Mousavizadeh of Tortoise Media in London has founded global indexes that answer those and other questions: The Global AI Index, the Responsibility100 Index, and the Global Disinformation Index. As Director of the Tortoise Intelligence team, her insights into geopolitical and industry conflicts and state of the art are highly prized by governments and multinationals. In part 2, we talk about China's race for AI gold, and the global disinformation index. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   How could you know which countries are doing a good job with artificial intelligence, and which sites are the worst disinformation spreaders? Sounds incredibly useful but impossible to figure out, right? Alexandra Mousavizadeh of Tortoise Media in London has founded global indexes that answer those and other questions: The Global AI Index, the Responsibility100 Index, and the Global Disinformation Index. As Director of the Tortoise Intelligence team, her insights into geopolitical and industry conflicts and state of the art are highly prized by governments and multinationals. In part 1, we talk about the methodologies behind the indexes, their relationship to ESG, inequality, and the labor markets. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Training an AI to render accurate decisions for important questions can be useless and dangerous if it cannot tell you why it made those decisions. Enter explainability, a term so new that it isn't in spellcheckers but is critical to the successful future of AI in critical applications. Michael Hind is a Distinguished Research Staff Member in the IBM Research AI department in Yorktown Heights, New York.  His current research passion is the area of Trusted AI, focusing on governance, transparency, explainability, and fairness of AI systems.  He helped launch several successful open source projects, such as AI Fairness 360 and AI Explainability 360. In part 2, we talk about the Teaching Explainable Decisions project, some of Michael’s experience with Watson, the difference between transparency and explainability, and a lot more.  All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Training an AI to render accurate decisions for important questions can be useless and dangerous if it cannot tell you why it made those decisions. Enter explainability, a term so new that it isn't in spellcheckers but is critical to the successful future of AI in critical applications. Before I talked with Michael Hind, my usual remark on the subject was, "If you want a demonstration of the ultimate futility of explainability, try asking your kid how the vase got broken." But after this episode I've learned more than I thought possible about how we can teach AI what an explanation is and how to produce one. Michael is a Distinguished Research Staff Member in the IBM Research AI department in Yorktown Heights, New York.  His current research passion is the area of Trusted AI, focusing on governance, transparency, explainability, and fairness of AI systems.  He helped launch several successful open source projects, such as AI Fairness 360 and AI Explainability 360. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   From AI in farming to AI in defense, Kordel France has done it, as an AI engineer and now founder and CEO of Seekar Technologies, which is building the first clinical AI tool used to advise neuropsychologists in diagnosing mental disorders. There are a lot of surprises in this episode as we talk about explainability, artificial general intelligence, and the fragility of image recognition AI, among other things. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   From AI in farming to AI in defense, Kordel France has done it, as an AI engineer and now founder and CEO of Seekar Technologies, which contributed AI to help ease demand on medical staffing and screen for COVID-19 faster. There are a lot of surprises - AI In hunting? - in this episode. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Jonathan Rowson is a chess grandmaster who was three times British champion, writing books including "The Moves That Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life." He is now a "philosophical activist" working on "an urgent one hundred year project to improve the relationships between systems, souls, and society" at Perspectiva.   Last week we talked about the impact of computers on the game of chess and the people who play it. This week we make the connection with Jonathan's career as a philosopher and how he intends Perspectiva to make a difference. He'll tell us about their antidebates: "Most of us don’t only disagree with each other, we disagree with ourselves. That’s a very important premise for the antidebate. The main battle is within your own reckoning with a difficult question." All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Jonathan Rowson is a chess grandmaster who was three times British champion, writing books including "The Moves That Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life." He is now a "philosophical activist" working on "an urgent one hundred year project to improve the relationships between systems, souls, and society" via the Perspectiva project.  Lots to talk about! We start out with the impact of computers on the game of chess and the people who play it: What does their encounter with AI have to teach the rest of us? All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   How is disinformation affecting our society, and what does AI have to do with it? I promised back in episode 1 that I would talk about disinformation, and now it's time to open that can of worms. I'll talk about the types of distortions, how social media algorithms spread them, the threats they pose, what's being done about them, and the role of AI in all this. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Daniel DeMillard has been with IBM's Watson Division and is now CTO of Foodspace, making apps that can connect any dietary or culinary preferences with the products that will fulfill them. We talk about all of that, get into what's realistic and what isn't with natural language understanding, the present and future of AI-assisted search, and... Joaquin Phoenix putting a paper bag over his head? (Some parts of the interview only make sense in context.) All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   What's it like to actually make AI work for customers in real-world applications where their investment has to pay off? Olivier Caron-Lizotte is the CEO of explor.ai, running a stable of developers to contract out. He's got the battle-tested experience about how that really works today and we get into the details of that. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Olav Krigolson (@thatneurosciguy) has fried his brain - in the name of science. (It was not permanent.) He's a TEDx speaker and hands-on neuroscientist at the University of Victoria, where he runs the Krigolson Lab, studying brainwaves. He's helped astronauts prepare to go to Mars and can tell what someone's going to say before they say it. (Within limits.) In part 2, we talk about interfacing with the brain and interpreting brainwaves, plus how to use neuroscience to jumpstart your creativity when your stuck in a pandemic rut. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Olav Krigolson (@thatneurosciguy) has fried his brain - in the name of science. (It was not permanent.) He's a hands-on neuroscientist at the University of Victoria, where he runs the Krigolson Lab, studying brainwaves. He's helped astronauts prepare to go to Mars and can tell what someone's going to say before they say it. (Within limits.) We talk about those things and applicability to AI in part 1 of our interview. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Amit Gupta has an amazing life story and is only just getting started. After a close encounter with death, he changed jobs, took up writing science fiction, and wrote an AI to help him. That AI - Sudowrite - is an amazingly capable and creative application of GPT-3 that earned a feature in The New Yorker, and we dig into what it does and how it does it. Writing is about to be transformed. Mention AI and You when applying for Sudowrite beta access and Amit will move you to the head of the line! All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Are you ready to interact with hyper-realistic digital avatars - computer-generated people - as part of your health care? They're not about to replace doctors and nurses, but they are ready to be an earlier part of the experience. Sathish Sankarpandi, data scientist at Orbital Global, tells us about the VirtTuri avatar (from "Virtual" and "Turing"). He'll tell us the capabilities and limits of today's AI-backed avatars. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   How will local and national authorities plan for self-driving vehicles in their jurisdictions? Todd Litman will help them. He is founder and executive director of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, an independent research organization dedicated to developing innovative solutions to transport problems. His report "Autonomous Vehicle Implementation Predictions" explores the impacts of autonomous vehicles, and their implications for transportation planning. In part 2, we talk about how AVs are likely to change transportation planning, and put some numbers around the projections. No zombie kangaroos this time, though. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   How will local and national authorities plan for self-driving vehicles in their jurisdictions? Todd Litman will help them. He is founder and executive director of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, an independent research organization dedicated to developing innovative solutions to transport problems. His report "Autonomous Vehicle Implementation Predictions" explores the impacts of autonomous vehicles, and their implications for transportation planning. In part 1 we talk about realistic expectations for AV implementation... plus zombie kangaroos. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Tomáš Mikolov is a PhD and research scientist at the Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics. He's done research for GoodAI and has worked at Google Brain and Facebook AI Research. He gave me some straight talk about the state of research and innovation in AI, and spelled out what it's missing and where researchers are playing it safe. We also talked about his research into "novelty search" and unpacked some ways to understand machine learning. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Kakia Chatsiou can tell you what a politician is really saying. Of course, most of us would say that the politician isn’t saying anything at all, but she’s more precise about it, and she uses AI to do it. She’s a professor at the University of Suffolk in the United Kingdom and this work shows up in her research paper Deep Learning for Political Science. She's an expert in natural language processing. We talk about how she analyzes the text of government COVID announcements to extract meaning, application to related fields such as ethics, and what it's like to be in this field. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Charles Radclyffe's company EthicsGrade grades companies on their AI ethics and governance and he has a lot to sat about what's ethical in AI companies, how to analyze it, what to do with that information, and how businesses can address their ethics. Charles was formerly head of AI at Fidelity International and founded the podcast Are You a Robot?, which I will be on on August 30 (2021). In part 2 we compare AI with other industries for their approaches to ethics, and discuss Charles' TEDx talk about the future of work: Three Steps to Surviving the Robot Revolution. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Charles Radclyffe's company EthicsGrade grades companies on their AI ethics and governance and he has a lot to sat about what's ethical in AI companies, how to analyze it, what to do with that information, and how businesses can address their ethics. Charles was formerly head of AI at Fidelity International and founded the podcast Are You a Robot?, which I will be on on August 30 (2021). In part 1 we make some distinctions about bias and privacy and talk about the challenges with both. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   What if you could do for text what Photoshop does for images? What if you could manipulate it and create whole new sections at the push of a button? Przemek Chojecki has a PhD in mathematics, is a member of the Forbes 30 under 30 list in Poland, wrote the new book, Artificial Intelligence Business: How you can profit from AI, and he has built a tool, Contentyze, that does that. We're going to find out what that's like, what made him jump from academia, and we'll even get into NFTs and DeFi. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   How do you get a robot to follow the law? Could an AI be taught to obey the Geneva Convention? Tony Gillespie says so, and he's the author of Systems Engineering for Ethical Autonomous Systems, which is as technical as it sounds. He is a Visiting Professor at University College London, a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and a fellow in avionics and mission systems in the UK’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory. He has applied the techniques in his book to autonomous cars and autonomous weapons and has given technical advice to the UN meetings discussing potential bans on lethal autonomous weapons.  In the conclusion of our interview, we talk about how autonomous cars can be designed to be safe and the current tensions in the industry as they try to do that. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   How do you get a robot to follow the law? Could an AI be taught to obey the Geneva Convention? Tony Gillespie says so, and he's the author of Systems Engineering for Ethical Autonomous Systems, which is as technical as it sounds. He is a Visiting Professor at University College London, a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and a fellow in avionics and mission systems in the UK’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory. He has applied the techniques in his book to autonomous cars and autonomous weapons and has given technical advice to the UN meetings discussing potential bans on lethal autonomous weapons.  We are turning from last week's speculative fiction to hard engineering this week, as Tony tells us how engineering is applied to the problem of accountability and international law in autonomous weapons. How do they fit into the rules of engagement and ethical combat? All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Episode 53 means we've reached our one-year anniversary! So we're marking the occasion with a lighter episode pair, a panel talk about AI in fiction: Books, movies, TV shows. I am joined by literary and science fiction educator Dr. Robert James, who is also a published expert on the Academy Awards; and by Jim Gifford, my publisher and the bibliographer of science fiction author Robert Heinlein. All of us were a team on the creation and production of the 2007 convention of Heinlein's centennial. In part 2 we talk about The Terminator, Star Trek, Wandavision, her, ex Machina, Philip K. Dick, and much, much more. This is a non-stop free-ranging conversation between experts passionate about this field. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.  Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Episode 52 means we've reached our one-year anniversary! So we're marking the occasion with a lighter episode pair, a panel talk about AI in fiction: Books, movies, TV shows. I am joined by literary and science fiction educator Dr. Robert James, who is also a published expert on the Academy Awards; and by Jim Gifford, my publisher and the bibliographer of science fiction author Robert Heinlein. All of us were a team on the creation and production of the 2007 convention of Heinlein's centennial. In part 1 our conversation spanned the early days of AI fiction up to the '70s, touching on Metropolis, Asimov, Colossus, Heinlein, 2001, and others. This is a non-stop free-ranging conversation between experts passionate about this field. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.  Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   AI is changing the law, and on the leading edge of figuring out how that should happen is Ryan Abbott, Professor of Law and Health Sciences at the University of Surrey in the UK, and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. We will be exploring issues raised in his recent book The Reasonable Robot: Artificial Intelligence and the Law.  In the conclusion of the interview, we’ll be talking about self-driving cars, liability and punishment for AI infractions, and rationales for changing our taxation system for AI-generated wealth. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.  Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   AI is changing the law, and on the leading edge of figuring out how that should happen is Ryan Abbott, Professor of Law and Health Sciences at the University of Surrey in the UK, and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. We will be exploring issues raised in his recent book The Reasonable Robot: Artificial Intelligence and the Law.  We’ll be getting into intellectual property, and whether an AI should be able to own them – and patents, and whether an AI can be an inventor of record, and then we’ll be getting into self-driving cars with some new takes on the Trolley Problem, and how the law and regulation should adapt, or has or has not adapted. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.  The June 3 Strategy and Leadership podcast episode referenced in the episode will be here. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   If you think you know what it's like to chat with today's AI, you may change your mind after encountering Phil D. Hall's work. He deploys chatbots as part performance art, part anthropological study pieces, part boundary-busting provocations, as well as serious tools for business enhancement. In part 2, we expand on his Echoborg creation, how it started, and where we might be heading with conversational AI in business and for helping people. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.  Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   If you think you know what it's like to chat with today's AI, you may change your mind after encountering Phil D. Hall's work. He deploys chatbots as part performance art, part anthropological study pieces, part boundary-busting provocations, as well as serious tools for business enhancement. We talk about his Echoborg creation and what happened when it met some British parliamentarians... All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.  Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Are the benefits of AI equally distributed across countries? Or is it another tool for agents of globalization and imperialism to tighten their grip and shut out the smaller players on the global stage? Rajiv Malhotra has a new book, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power: 5 Battlegrounds, that addresses that issue, and draws attention to how India in particular is collateral damage in the struggle for dominance between AI superpowers. In part 2, we talk about the future of jobs from an equity and inclusion frame, the Timnit Gebru incident at Google and parallels affecting developing countries, and our future with AI seen through an eastern spiritual perspective. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.  Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Are the benefits of AI equally distributed across countries? Or is it another tool for agents of globalization and imperialism to tighten their grip and shut out the smaller players on the global stage? Rajiv Malhotra has a new book, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power: 5 Battlegrounds, that addresses that issue, and draws attention to how India in particular is collateral damage in the struggle for dominance between AI superpowers. In this episode, we talk about how Western universalism and Chinese nationalism shape geopolitical structures that AI is now entering into, and how the history and geography of Asia affects them. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.  Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   What happens when an engineer becomes an angel investor and thought leader in AI? You get Rob May, former co-founder and CEO of Talla, an AI assistant platform, now General Partner at PJC, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on investing in, supporting, and building relationships with entrepreneurs who are creating the future. Rob also writes the world’s most popular newsletter on artificial intelligence – InsideAI. In part 2, we talk about emotion AI, whether we're in an AI bubble, and what startups should - and shouldn't focus on. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.  Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   What happens when an engineer becomes an angel investor and thought leader in AI? You get Rob May, former co-founder and CEO of Talla, an AI assistant platform, now General Partner at PJC, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on investing in, supporting, and building relationships with entrepreneurs who are creating the future. Rob also writes the world’s most popular newsletter on artificial intelligence – InsideAI. We talk about the state of startups in brain-computer interfaces, the role of ethical issues in evaluating startups, and just how Rob made the transition from engineer to investor. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.  Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   What could it be like inside the mind of an artificial intelligence that has just evolved consciousness? Our guest today has imagined just that. David Gerrold has written some of the most widely-read and -viewed science fiction of the last 60 years, starting with classic Star Trek's Trouble with Tribbles episode and several other episodes of that and other Star Trek, Babylon 5, Twilight Zone, and other TV series, plus novels such as The Man Who Folded Himself, and series including the War Against the Chtorr and the Dingilliad, winning the Hugo and Nebula awards for the noval The Martian Child. We focused on his novel When HARLIE Was One, about an AI that became conscious, which develops (more thoughtfully than most such stories) how the interaction with the humans around him changed HARLIE... and them. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.  Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   What could it be like inside the mind of an artificial intelligence that has just evolved consciousness? Our guest today has imagined just that. David Gerrold has written some of the most widely-read and -viewed science fiction of the last 60 years, starting with classic Star Trek's Trouble with Tribbles episode and several other episodes of that and other Star Trek, Babylon 5, Twilight Zone, and other TV series, plus novels such as The Man Who Folded Himself, and series including the War Against the Chtorr and the Dingilliad, winning the Hugo and Nebula awards for the noval The Martian Child. We focused on his novel When HARLIE Was One, about an AI that became conscious, which develops (more thoughtfully than most such stories) how the interaction with the humans around him changed HARLIE... and them. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.  Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Lethal autonomous weapons are here, and we're going to see much more of them. What concerns do these raise, and what should we do about them? Those may seem like intractable problems, but Peter Asaro tackles them. He is a professor at the New School in New York, and is a philosopher of science, technology and media. His work examines artificial intelligence and robotics as a form of digital media, the ethical dimensions of algorithms and data, and the ways in which technology mediates social relations and shapes our experience of the world. In the world of autonomous weapons, he works as the co-founder and co-chair of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. In part 2 of our interview we talk about that committee and related organizations, what they do to elevate our thinking and governance of autonomous weapons and how they do it, and we discuss the famous Slaughterbots video, plus Peter's documentary, Love Machine. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.  Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Lethal autonomous weapons are here, and we're going to see much more of them. What concerns do these raise, and what should we do about them? Those may seem like intractable problems, but Peter Asaro tackles them. He is a professor at the New School in New York, and is a philosopher of science, technology and media. His work examines artificial intelligence and robotics as a form of digital media, the ethical dimensions of algorithms and data, and the ways in which technology mediates social relations and shapes our experience of the world. In the world of autonomous weapons, he works as the co-founder and co-chair of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. We talk about just what distinctions are useful when thinking about the regulation of autonomous weapons, seen through the lens of his precise and highly informed thinking. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.  Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   When you combine anthropologist, filmmaker, and geek, you get Beth Singler, Research Fellow in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. Beth explores the social, ethical, philosophical and religious implications of advances in artificial intelligence and robotics and has produced some dramatic documentaries about our relationship with AI: Pain in the Machine and its sequels, Friend in the Machine, Good in the Machine, and Ghost in the Machine. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.  Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   When you combine anthropologist, filmmaker, and geek, you get Beth Singler, Research Fellow in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. Beth explores the social, ethical, philosophical and religious implications of advances in artificial intelligence and robotics and has produced some dramatic documentaries about our relationship with AI: Pain in the Machine and its sequels, Friend in the Machine, Good in the Machine, and Ghost in the Machine. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.  Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Steve Shwartz is a serial software entrepreneur and investor, with a PhD from Johns Hopkins university in cognitive science and did postdoc research in AI at Yale. He is the author of the new book Evil Robots, Killer Computers, and Other Myths: The Truth About AI and the Future of Humanity, published by Fast Company Press on February 9. In part 2 of our interview, we talk about "artificial intelligence and natural stupidity" (we had to get that one in eventually, didn't we?), impacts on employment and Steve's take on the Oxford Martin study, and... common sense. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.  Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Steve Shwartz is a serial software entrepreneur and investor, with a PhD from Johns Hopkins university in cognitive science and did postdoc research in AI at Yale. He is the author of the new book Evil Robots, Killer Computers, and Other Myths: The Truth About AI and the Future of Humanity, published by Fast Company Press on February 9. We talk about bias, explainability, and other current problems with machine learning, plus... horse racing. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.  Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   We continue the interview with Michael Wooldridge, head of the Oxford University Computer Science department and author of A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence, an introductory look at AI, published Jan 2021 by Flatiron Books. He's been working on AI for 30 years and specializes in multi-agent systems, which we talk about. He's written over 400 articles and nine books, including the Ladybird Expert Guide to Artificial Intelligence. We cover a huge amount of ground, from autonomous weapons and self-driving cars, to Michael's work on multi-agent systems and the potential for my Siri to talk to your Alexa. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.  Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   My guest this week is Michael Wooldridge, head of the Oxford University Computer Science department and author of A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence, an introductory look at AI, published last month by Flatiron Books. He's been working on AI for 30 years and specializes in multi-agent systems, which we talk about. He's written over 400 articles and nine books, including the Ladybird Expert Guide to Artificial Intelligence. We cover a huge amount of ground, from the changes in AI to ways of judging artificial general intelligence, to challenges that AI faces in dealing with the real world. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.  Here's the link to my live class mentioned in the episode: https://bit.ly/UVicAIandYou Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   "What is AI?" That question is one of the ones in the opening credits of this podcast, and in this episode, I'm going to give you a whistle-stop tour of what AI is. No computer experience required; if you've no idea how AI is built and what makes it tick, this will get you off to a good start. If you've already got some chops in computer software, then this episode may help you grasp how to explain AI to your friends. I'll go from the beginnings of GOFAI to the latest capsule networks, talking about how they're built and some of their limitations. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   I promised to expand on my last TEDx talk (https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_j_scott_how_to_save_us_from_being_left_behind_by_ai), and this is that episode. If you're an aspiring public speaker, you'll hear what went into creating the talk, the inspirations and reasons behind every word, the cycle of how it was built and modified in response to feedback. If you're interested in the ideas that it raised, this episode expands on those and gives you more insight into how AI is setting the pace of life and what that means. Are we on an unsustainable path? How would we get off it? Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   At the intersection of artificial intelligence and law... you'll find Dr. Edward Parson. He's the Dan and Rae Emmett Professor of Environmental Law and director of the AI-PULSE project at UCLA conducting “interdisciplinary research and innovative programming to study how technological advances and scientific knowledge and uncertainties influence law and policy making, and how their impacts can be managed to advance human and societal well-being.” In part 2, we talk about regulation vs the Trolley Problem, Ted's work on longer-term consequences of AI, and what it's like to work on a project like PULSE. All this plus the latest headlines in AI! Here is a link to my University of Victoria continuing studies course on AI: https://bit.ly/UVicAIandYou as mentioned in the episode. Signup deadline: Feb 6. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   At the intersection of artificial intelligence and law... you'll find Dr. Edward Parson. He's the Dan and Rae Emmett Professor of Environmental Law and director of the AI-PULSE project at UCLA conducting “interdisciplinary research and innovative programming to study how technological advances and scientific knowledge and uncertainties influence law and policy making, and how their impacts can be managed to advance human and societal well-being.” We talk about the work of PULSE, sources of bias in AI, and the use of AI in law. All this plus the latest headlines in AI! Here is a link to my University of Victoria continuing studies course on AI: https://bit.ly/UVicAIandYou as mentioned in the episode. Signup deadline: Feb 6. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   How does a business successfully deploy #AI, especially if they are new at it? Katie King is a UK-based AI consultant and marketing expert, and member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group task force on AI (APPG-AI). She is the author of the book Using Artificial Intelligence in Marketing: How to Harness AI and Maintain the Competitive Edge, and CEO of the AI in Business consultancy, taking her to locations like Dubai and Singapore, and which I am a partner in. In part 2, we talk about education of AI and how it should shift, and what students entering the job market should do. Reach Katie via LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. All this plus the latest headlines in AI! Here is a teaser opportunity for you readers of show notes: https://bit.ly/UVicAIandYou so you can jump in ahead of the announcement in episode 30! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   How does a business successfully deploy #AI, especially if they are new at it? Katie King is a UK-based AI consultant and marketing expert, and member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group task force on AI (APPG-AI). She is the author of the book Using Artificial Intelligence in Marketing: How to Harness AI and Maintain the Competitive Edge, and CEO of the AI in Business consultancy, taking her to locations like Dubai and Singapore, and which I am a partner in. We talk about how she got into AI consulting, trends that apply to businesses looking to adopt AI, and her work on the APPG-AI. Reach Katie via LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. All this plus predictions for 2021! Here is a teaser opportunity for you readers of show notes: https://bit.ly/UVicAIandYou so you can jump in ahead of the announcement in episode 30! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   TEDx: The franchise of the TED organization and the venue for speakers on all kinds of thought-provoking topics. What is it like to apply for and give a TEDx talk? This episode is a little different (it's the holidays), and goes into my experiences getting to the TEDx stage (three times) and since then, evaluating technology speakers for one of the premier TEDx events in North America. That TEDx talk is online at https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_j_scott_how_to_save_us_from_being_left_behind_by_ai. All that and our usual look at today's headlines in AI. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Exponential technology such as artificial intelligence causes the complexity of our world to explode. How do we address complexity as an existential risk in itself? Enter Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon, director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University, in British Columbia. He describes himself as a Complex Systems Theorist, and has a PhD from MIT in international relations, defense and arms control policy, and conflict theory. His research has focused on threats to global security in the 21st century, including economic instability, climate change, and energy scarcity. He and the Cascade Institute study how people, organizations, and societies can better resolve their conflicts and innovate in response to complex problems. In part 2 of our talk, we continue discussing his latest book, Commanding Hope, Systems Thinking, and how to identify mechanisms for shaping our collective beliefs and attitudes to produce more effective action on, say, climate change. All that and our usual look at today's headlines in AI. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Exponential technology such as artificial intelligence causes the complexity of our world to explode. How do we address complexity as an existential risk in itself? Enter Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon, director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University, in British Columbia. He describes himself as a Complex Systems Theorist, and has a PhD from MIT in international relations, defense and arms control policy, and conflict theory. His research has focused on threats to global security in the 21st century, including economic instability, climate change, and energy scarcity. He and the Cascade Institute study how people, organizations, and societies can better resolve their conflicts and innovate in response to complex problems. In our talk, we discuss his latest book, Commanding Hope, and the role of hope in empowering us to tackle our biggest problems. All that and our usual look at today's headlines in AI. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   We tackle the most important question about Artificial General Intelligence - When Will It Happen? Everyone really wants to know, but no one has a clue.  Estimates range from 5 to 500 years. So why talk about it? I talk about how this question was raised in a presentation and what it means to me and all of us. We might not be able to get a date, but we'll explore why it's such a hard question and see what useful questions we can get out of it. All that and our usual look at today's headlines in AI. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.  

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Every Johnson should have a Boswell, and the entire artificial intelligence field has Pamela McCorduck as its scribe. Part historian, part humorist, part raconteuse, her books romp through the history and characters of AI as both authoritative record and belles-lettres. Machines Who Think (1979, 2003) and her recent sequel This Could Be Important (2019) help understand the who, what, and why of where AI has come from. In the second half of this interview, we talk about changes in the experience of women in computing, C. P. Snow's "Two Cultures", and the interaction between AI and the humanities, along with more tales of its founding fathers. All that and our usual look at today's headlines in AI. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.  

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Every Johnson should have a Boswell, and the entire artificial intelligence field has Pamela McCorduck as its scribe. Part historian, part humorist, part raconteuse, her books romp through the history and characters of AI as both authoritative record and belles-lettres. Machines Who Think (1979, 2003) and her recent sequel This Could Be Important (2019) help understand the who, what, and why of where AI has come from. In this interview, we talk about the boom-bust cycle of AI, why the founders of the field thought they could crack the problem of thought in a summer, and the changes in thinking about intelligence since the early days. All that and our usual look at today's headlines in AI. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.  

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   How do you drive a community of futurists? David Wood was one of the pioneers of the smartphone industry, co-founding Symbian in 1998. He is now an independent futurist consultant, speaker and writer. As Chair of the London Futurists, he has hosted over 200 public discussions about technoprogressive topics. He is the author or lead editor of nine books, including Smartphones for All, The Abolition of Aging, Transcending Politics, and Sustainable Superabundance. In the second half of our interview, we talk about OpenAI, economic fairness with the AI dividend, how building an ecosystem with feedback cycles addresses disruption, and how you can participate in shaping the future. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.  

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   How do you drive a community of futurists? David Wood was one of the pioneers of the smartphone industry, co-founding Symbian in 1998. He is now an independent futurist consultant, speaker and writer. As Chair of the London Futurists, he has hosted over 200 public discussions about technoprogressive topics. He is the author or lead editor of nine books, including Smartphones for All, The Abolition of Aging, Transcending Politics, and Sustainable Superabundance. In part 1 of our interview, we talk about David's singularitarian philosophy, the evolution and impact of Deep Learning, and his SingularityNET infrastructure for AI interoperation. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.  

This and all episodes at: http://aiandyou.net/ .   Tony Czarnecki is a futurist and a Managing Partner of Sustensis, London – a Think Tank for inspirations for Humanity's transition to coexistence with superintelligence – the final form of an ever faster and more intelligent, self-learning and perhaps even conscious Artificial Intelligence. Tony is the author of several books on the subject of Superintelligence. In this concluding part of our interview, we talk about his latest book in his Posthumans series, "Becoming a Butterfly," and European and global economic structures for sustaining technological evolution. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.  

This and all episodes at: http://aiandyou.net/ .   Tony Czarnecki is a futurist and a Managing Partner of Sustensis, London – a Think Tank for inspirations for Humanity's transition to coexistence with superintelligence – the final form of an ever faster and more intelligent, self-learning and perhaps even conscious Artificial Intelligence. Tony is the author of several books on the subject of Superintelligence. In this first part of our interview, we talk about his latest book in his Posthumans series, "Becoming a Butterfly," and discuss the pandemic and what's next. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.  

This and all episodes at: http://aiandyou.net/ .   What does it look like to be on the front lines of academic research into making future AI safe? It looks like Roman Yampolskiy, professor at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, director of their Cyber Security lab and key contributor to the field of AI Safety. With over 100 papers and books on AI, Roman is recognized as an AI expert the world over. In this second part of our interview, we talk about his latest paper: a comprehensive analysis of the Control Problem, the central issue of AI safety: How do we ensure future AI remains under our control? We also discuss the current limitations of AI and how AI may evolve. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.  

This and all episodes at: http://aiandyou.net/ .   What does it look like to be on the front lines of academic research into making future AI safe? It looks like Roman Yampolskiy, professor at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, director of their Cyber Security lab and key contributor to the field of AI Safety. With over 100 papers and books on AI, Roman is recognized as an AI expert the world over. In this first part of our interview, we talk about his latest paper, a comprehensive analysis of the Control Problem, the central issue of AI safety: How do we ensure future AI remains under our control? All this and our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.  

This and all episodes at: http://aiandyou.net/ .   How will we keep our current and future artificial intelligences ethically aligned with human preferences? Who do we need to help with that? Answer: A philosopher of the use of emerging cognitive technologies. Karina Vold is Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto’s Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology and has recently come from the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. She thinks, writes, and speaks about the the evolution of #AI from a philosopher's perspective. In the second half of this interview we learn about value alignment, the Trolley Problem, and just what those institutes do about AI.  Ever wondered whether you could make a living as a philosopher? Karina will tell you how she has. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.  

This and all episodes at: http://aiandyou.net/ .   How will we keep our current and future artificial intelligences ethically aligned with human preferences? Who do we need to help with that? Answer: A philosopher of the use of emerging cognitive technologies. Karina Vold is Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto’s Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology and has recently come from the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. She thinks, writes, and speaks about the the evolution of AI from a philosopher's perspective. In this interview we learn about the Philosophy of Mind, the Extended Mind Hypothesis - and find out who Otto and Inga are. Ever wondered whether you could make a living as a philosopher? Karina will tell you how she has. All this and our usual look at today's AI headlines Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.  

This and all episodes at: http://aiandyou.net/ .   Have you seen a robot help a troubled child? This week's guest makes one. This is part 2 of the interview with Paolo Pirjanian, who is the former CTO of iRobot and early leader in the field of consumer robotics with 16+ years of experience developing and commercializing cutting-edge home robots. He led world-class teams and companies at iRobot®, Evolution Robotics®, and others.  In 2016, Paolo founded Embodied, Inc. with the vision to build socially and emotionally intelligent companions that improve care and wellness and enhance our daily lives. We will learn more about how Moxie the robot works, what it can do, and Paolo's plans for future robots. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.  

This and all episodes at: http://aiandyou.net/ .   Have you seen a robot help a troubled child? This week's guest makes one. Paolo Pirjanian is the former CTO of iRobot and early leader in the field of consumer robotics with 16+ years of experience developing and commercializing cutting-edge home robots. He led world-class teams and companies at iRobot®, Evolution Robotics®, and others.  In 2016, Paolo founded Embodied, Inc. with the vision to build socially and emotionally intelligent companions that improve care and wellness and enhance our daily lives. All this and our usual look at today's AI headlines Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.  

This and all episodes at: http://aiandyou.net/ .   We’ve spent all this time talking about artificial intelligence and we know what ‘artificial’ means, but what is ‘intelligence’? Who better to answer that than the International Supervisory Psychologist of Mensa, Kristóf Kovács? He is a senior research fellow at Eötvös Loránd University researching cognitive psychology and psychometrics. Most people are content to define 'intelligence' as 'that which an IQ score measures', - but what if it's your job to write the IQ test? To validate those tests? To know what they mean? How can we know what artificial intelligence is until we understand the real thing? Find out more in this episode, when we also talk about what IQ tests are measuring and how to interpret them, what Mensa does, and Kristóf's research into the g-factor of intelligence. All this and our usual look at today's AI headlines and a description of my upcoming continuing studies course at the University of Victoria on the same theme as this podcast, which is open to online enrollment from all over the world; register at https://bit.ly/UVicAIandYou. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.  

This and all episodes at: http://aiandyou.net/ .   We’ve spent all this time talking about artificial intelligence and we know what ‘artificial’ means, but what is ‘intelligence’? Who better to answer that than the International Supervisory Psychologist of Mensa, Kristóf Kovács? He is a senior research fellow at Eötvös Loránd University researching cognitive psychology and psychometrics. Most people are content to define 'intelligence' as 'that which an IQ score measures', - but what if it's your job to write the IQ test? To validate those tests? To know what they mean? How can we know what artificial intelligence is until we understand the real thing? Find out more in this episode! All this and our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.  

This and all episodes at: http://aiandyou.net/ .   What happens when two futurists talk with each other? You get this episode, with guest Richard Foster-Fletcher, who is doing amazing work in the UK building learning communities such as MKAI (Milton Keynes AI), he is a graduate of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Strategy Course and is the host of the ‘Boundless: Designing Our Digital Future’ podcast, of which I was the very first guest. In this conclusion of our interview, we talk about how the cultures of organizations facing disruption should change,and some of Richard's experiences in creating forums for debating AI policies. All this and some of today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.  

  What happens when two futurists talk with each other? You get this episode, with guest Richard Foster-Fletcher, who is doing amazing work in the UK building learning communities such as MKAI (Milton Keynes AI), he is a graduate of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Strategy Course and is the host of the ‘Boundless: Designing Our Digital Future’ podcast, of which I was the very first guest. We reach some heady heights talking about the eventual future of humans in symbiosis with AI, even touching on the Kardashev scale! And yet we also brought it back to the here and now with discussions about what AI learning communities are doing right now to help people understand AI more productively. All that and our first look at GPT-3! Transcript at HumanCusp Blog.  

  This show's amazing guest has seen naked brains... while they were still in use. This episode concludes the interview with Dr. Ryan D'Arcy. He is a neuroscientist, pictured here with one of his tools, an MRI machine. He co-founded HealthTech Connex Inc., and serves as President and Chief Scientific Officer. HealthTech Connex translates neuroscience advances into health technology breakthroughs. We met on the TEDx stage in Surrey BC, where he was speaking about how he helped Trevor Greene, a soldier who had his head split by an axe while serving in Afghanistan. See his TEDx talk here. In this episode, we talk about models of the structure of the brain, the role of pattern recognition, brain-machine interfaces by companies such as Neuralink, and how they might - or should - work. All that and of course our usual look at a headline or two about AI. Transcript at HumanCusp Blog.    

This show's amazing guest has seen naked brains... while they were still in use. Dr. Ryan D'Arcy is a neuroscientist, pictured here with one of his tools, an MRI machine. He co-founded HealthTech Connex Inc., and serves as President and Chief Scientific Officer. HealthTech Connex translates neuroscience advances into health technology breakthroughs. We met on the TEDx stage in Surrey BC, where he was speaking about how he helped Trevor Greene, a soldier who had his head split by an axe while serving in Afghanistan. See his TEDx talk here. In this episode, we talk about why he loves to fix broken brains, and what's going on in our brains, with brainwaves, neurons, and - just what is a thought, anyhow? If you want to learn how to harness neuroplasticity to improve your own brain, Ryan tells you how in this episode. All that and of course our usual look at a headline about AI. Transcript at HumanCusp Blog.    

Disruption happens when the future arrives faster than we anticipated. We've had plenty of that lately, but as far as the disruption from artificial intelligence is concerned, it's only warming up. Sink, swim, or surf: how do you want to handle the waves of change AI is bringing? To help us stretch our imagination, this episode concludes the interview with our mind-blowing guests Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, science fiction authors with numerous credits in science fiction and Hollywood for over thirty years, particularly in the Star Trek universe, writing novels such as Memory Prime and Prime Directive and with writer and producer credits on the series Star Trek Enterprise. They’ve helped NASA with visioning future goals through a Space Policy workshop, they’ve helped Disney design theme park rides, and they won the Constellation award for creating the series Primeval: New World. Catch their author page on Amazon. In this episode, we talk about their careers, how to use science fiction to become more creative, possible and likely evolutions of AI and humanity, and implications of brain-machine interfaces.  All that and our customary look at today's headlines in AI. Transcript at HumanCusp Blog.    

Disruption happens when the future arrives faster than we anticipated. We've had plenty of that lately, but as far as the disruption from artificial intelligence is concerned, it's only warming up. Sink, swim, or surf: how do you want to handle the waves of change AI is bringing? To help us stretch our imagination, this episode's mind-blowing guests are Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, science fiction authors with numerous credits in science fiction and Hollywood for over thirty years, particularly in the Star Trek universe, writing novels such as Memory Prime and Prime Directive and with writer and producer credits on the series Star Trek Enterprise. They’ve helped NASA with visioning future goals through a Space Policy workshop, they’ve helped Disney design theme park rides, and they won the Constellation award for creating the series Primeval: New World. In this episode, we talk about their experiences in the world of science fiction and how they've changed with the pandemic, adventures helping NASA, the aspirations of Star Trek, and their thoughts about what advanced AIs would really be like.  All that and our customary look at today's headlines in AI. Transcript at HumanCusp Blog.  

What does one of the nations that has most successfully defended itself against the coronavirus have to teach us about AI? Plenty, when the architect of their digital response to COVID-19 is also a technology genius. In this episode, I conclude my talk with Audrey Tang, Taiwan's Digital Information Minister. She's responsible for Taiwan's "Digital Democracy" and has a sky-high IQ. We talk about the impact of AI on jobs, how AI can be developed transparently, national and international strategies for safe AI advancement, and what Audrey foresees for the next 10 years. What is the responsibility of government to its citizens as technology advances, if that advance may leave some behind? We get into that and much more in this episode. For more on Audrey's "humor vs rumor" approach to combating information warfare, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClmT6bZX5yE. Transcript at HumanCusp Blog. Image credit: Wikipedia.  

What does one of the nations that has most successfully defended itself against the coronavirus have to teach us about AI? Plenty, when the architect of their digital response to COVID-19 is also a technology genius. In this episode, I talk with Audrey Tang, Taiwan's Digital Information minister. She's responsible for Taiwan's "Digital Democracy" and has a sky-high IQ. We talk about what digital democracy is, how it powered Tawian's virus defense, and how it also defeats disinformation campaigns ranging from conspiracy rumors to information warfare. What is the responsibility of government to its citizens as technology advances, if that advance may leave some behind? We get into that and much more in this episode. For more on Audrey's "humor vs rumor" approach to combating information warfare, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClmT6bZX5yE. Transcript at HumanCusp Blog. Image credit: Wikipedia.