This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . My guest is the co-host of the Good Robot Podcast, "Where technology meets feminism." Eleanor Drage is a Senior Research Fellow at The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge and was named in the Top 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics of 2022. She is also co-author of a recent book also called The Good Robot: Why Technology Needs Feminism.  We talk about about all that, plus some quantum mechanics, saunas, ham, lesbian bacteria, and… well it’ll all make more sense when you listen. 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 is a really good role model for how a young person can carve out an important niche in the AI space, especially for people who aren’t inclined to the computer science side of the field. Fiona McEvoy is author of the blog YouTheData.com, with a specific focus on the intersection of technology and society. She was named as one of “30 Influential Women Advancing AI in San Francisco” by RE•WORK, and in 2020 was honored in the inaugural Brilliant Women in AI Ethics Hall of Fame, established to recognize “Brilliant women who have made exceptional contributions to the space of AI Ethics and diversity.” We talk about her journey to becoming an influential communicator and the ways she carries that out, what it’s like for young people in this social cauldron being heated by AI, and some of the key issues affecting 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/ .   At the end of February there was a landmark conference in Panama City and online, the Beneficial AGI Summit. AGI of course standing for Artificial General Intelligence, the Holy Grail of AI. My guest is Jerome C. Glenn, one of the organizers and sponsors, and who has a long and storied history of pivotal leadership and contributions to addressing existential issues. He is the co-founder and CEO of The Millennium Project on global futures research, was contracted by the European Commission to write the AGI paper for their Horizon 2025-2027 program, was the Washington, DC representative for the United Nations University as executive director of their American Council, and was instrumental in naming the first Space Shuttle the Enterprise, banning the first space weapon (the Fractional Orbital Bombardment System) in SALT II, and shared the 2022 Lifeboat Guardian Award with Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He has over 50 years of futures research experience working for governments, international organizations, and private industry in Science & Technology Policy, Environmental Security, Economics, Education, Defense, Space, and much more.  In this second half we talk about approaches for actually controlling the development of AGI that were developed at the conference, the AI arms race, and… why Jerome doesn’t like the term futurism.  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 end of February there was a landmark conference in Panama City and online, the Beneficial AGI Summit. AGI of course standing for Artificial General Intelligence, the Holy Grail of AI. My guest is Jerome C. Glenn, one of the organizers and sponsors, and who has a long and storied history of pivotal leadership and contributions to addressing existential issues. He is the co-founder and CEO of The Millennium Project on global futures research, was contracted by the European Commission to write the AGI paper for their Horizon 2025-2027 program, was the Washington, DC representative for the United Nations University as executive director of their American Council, and was instrumental in naming the first Space Shuttle the Enterprise, banning the first space weapon (the Fractional Orbital Bombardment System) in SALT II, and shared the 2022 Lifeboat Guardian Award with Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He has over 50 years of futures research experience working for governments, international organizations, and private industry in Science & Technology Policy, Environmental Security, Economics, Education, Defense, Space, and much more.  In this first half we talk about his recent work with groups of the United Nations General Assembly, and his decentralized approach to grassroots empowerment in both implementing AGI and working together to regulate it. 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 our relationship with bots - robots and chatbots - evolving and what does it mean? We're talking with Eve Herold, who has a new book, Robots and the People Who Love Them: Holding on to our Humanity in an Age of Social Robots. Eve is an award-winning science writer and consultant in the scientific and medical nonprofit space. She writes about issues at the crossroads of science and society, and has been featured in Vice, Medium, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, Prevention, The Kiplinger Report, and The Washington Post and on MSNBC, NPR, and CNN. In this part we talk about how robots and AI can bring out the best and the worst in us, the responsibilities of roboticists, the difference between robots having emotions and our believing that they have emotions, and how this will evolve over the next decade or 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/ .   How is our relationship with bots - robots and chatbots - evolving and what does it mean? We're talking with Eve Herold, who has a new book, Robots and the People Who Love Them: Holding on to our Humanity in an Age of Social Robots. Eve is an award-winning science writer and consultant in the scientific and medical nonprofit space. She writes about issues at the crossroads of science and society, and has been featured in Vice, Medium, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, Prevention, The Kiplinger Report, and The Washington Post and on MSNBC, NPR, and CNN. In this part we talk about how people – including soldiers in combat - get attached to AIs and robots, we discuss ELIZA, Woebot, and Samantha from the movie Her, and the role of robots in helping take care of us physically and emotionally, among many other topics. 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/ .   Returning as our first three-peat guest is Roman Yampolskiy, tenured Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Louisville in Kentucky where he is also the director of the Cyber Security Laboratory. Roman is here to talk about his new book, AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable. Roman has been central in the field of warning about the Control Problem and Value Alignment Problems of AI from the very beginning, back when doing so earned people some scorn from practitioners, yet Roman is a professor of computer science and applies rigorous methods to his analyses of these problems. It’s those rigorous methods that we tap into in this interview, because Roman connects principles of computer science to the issue of existential risk from AI. In this part we talk about how we should respond to the problem of unsafe AI development and how Roman and his community are addressing it, what he would do with infinite resources, and… the threat Roman’s coffee cup poses to humanity.  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/ .   Returning as our first three-peat guest is Roman Yampolskiy, tenured Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Louisville in Kentucky where he is also the director of the Cyber Security Laboratory. Roman is here to talk about his new book, AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable. Roman has been central in the field of warning about the Control Problem and Value Alignment Problems of AI from the very beginning, back when doing so earned people some scorn from practitioners, yet Roman is a professor of computer science and applies rigorous methods to his analyses of these problems. It’s those rigorous methods that we tap into in this interview, because Roman connects principles of computer science to the issue of existential risk from AI. In this part we talk about why this work is important to Roman, the dimensions of the elements of unexplainability, unpredictability, and uncontrollability, the level of urgency of the problems, and drill down into why today’s AI is not safe and why it’s getting worse. 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/ .   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 the conclusion, we talk about the role of sleep in human cognition, AGI and consciousness, and… penguins. 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/ .   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.