Artificial Intelligence and You

"The book seems to be more timely than originally anticipated."  I'm talking with Carl Benedikt Frey about his new book, How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations, and its exploration of the political and economic effects of policies like tariffs and university defunding comes at a very critical time. AI is projected to have enormous economic and social impacts that call for the biggest of big picture thinking, and Frey is the co-author of the 2013 study The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerization, which has received over 12,000 citations.

He is Associate Professor of AI and Work at the Oxford Internet Institute and Director and Founder of the Future of Work Programme at the Oxford Martin School, both at the University of Oxford. His 2019 book, The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation, was selected as a Financial Times Best Book of the Year and awarded Princeton University’s Richard A. Lester Prize.  

We talk about whether progress is inevitable, how growth depends on the interplay of technology and institutions, the link between productivity and innovation, the importance of institutional flexibility and decentralized funding, the effects of tariffs, the risks of China’s increasingly centralized model, and why the US and China are both triggering declining dynamism in each other.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

I'm talking with Megan Peters, who researches thinking about thinking, or metacognition. She is an Associate Professor in the UC Irvine Department of Cognitive Sciences, studying how the brain represents and uses uncertainty, focusing on how these abilities support metacognitive evaluations of the quality of our decisions. She’s a Fellow in the UCI Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, the UCI Center for Theoretical Behavioral Sciences, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Brain Mind & Consciousness program. She’s also President and Co-founder of Neuromatch, an educational platform serving over 30,000 students in over 120 countries across computational neurosciences, deep learning, computational climate science, and neuroAI.

In our conclusion, we talk about Turing Tests, measuring the brain, the Haunted Mansion, some cool experiments on brains, and… cats.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Have you ever thought about thinking? That’s called metacognition, and Megan Peters thinks about that, a lot. She is an Associate Professor in the UC Irvine Department of Cognitive Sciences, researching how the brain represents and uses uncertainty, focusing on how these abilities support metacognitive evaluations of the quality of our decisions. She’s a Fellow in the UCI Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, the UCI Center for Theoretical Behavioral Sciences, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Brain Mind & Consciousness program. She’s also President and Co-founder of Neuromatch, an educational platform serving over 30,000 students in over 120 countries across computational neurosciences, deep learning, computational climate science, and neuroAI.

We get really meta here: talking about thinking about thinking,  how we build models of the world, how language shapes our thinking, whether AI is doing metacognition in its chains of thought, statistical learning in AIs and humans, consciousness in humans and animals and AIs, and theories of consciousness.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

I am talking with neuroscientist Christof Koch, and as he says, "How is it that we, a piece of furniture of the universe like a rock or a star or a tree, can love or hate or see or hear?" What, in other words, makes us conscious, and what does that mean? He is known for his work exploring the substrate of consciousness in humans, animals, and machines and is the author of more than 350 peer-reviewed publications and five books, the latest of which is Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It. A physicist and neurobiologist, he was for more than a quarter of a century a professor of biology and engineering at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. In 2011, he became the Chief Scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle and in 2015, its president; now a Meritorious Investigator. He is also the Chief Scientist of the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation in Santa Monica, seeking to understand consciousness, its place in nature, and how this knowledge can benefit all of humanity.

In part 2, we talk about a theory of consciousness that Christof is a primary researcher of: Integrated Information Theory, and tools for detecting and measuring consciousness, the magic number φ, the possibility of consciousness transfer, philosophical zombies, and neural correlates of consciousness.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

As my guest today says, "How is it that we, a piece of furniture of the universe like a rock or a star or a tree, can love or hate or see or hear?" What, in other words, makes us conscious, and what does that mean? He is the cognitive scientist Christof Koch, known for his work exploring the substrate of consciousness in humans, animals, and machines. He is the author of more than 350 peer-reviewed publications and five books, the latest of which is Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It. A physicist and neurobiologist, he was for more than a quarter of a century a professor of biology and engineering at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. In 2011, he became the Chief Scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle and in 2015, its president; now a Meritorious Investigator. He is also the Chief Scientist of the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation in Santa Monica, seeking to understand consciousness, its place in nature, and how this knowledge can benefit all of humanity.

Why is an AI show interested in consciousness? Because the questions constantly arise, is AI conscious? How will we know when it is? How can or should we make it conscious? And if we can’t answer those questions for human beings, how will we answer them for anything else?

We talk about the relationships between existence, identity, quantum mechanics, language, and consciousness, and cosmic consciousness, how conscious parts of your body might be, connecting brains to each other, including an example that’s already happened, and… opera. It is possibly literally mind blowing.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

"We are in the privileged - or unfortunate - situation of being the last generation of humans to be parenting AIs. All the future generations of AIs are going to be parented mainly by AIs. And so even more than with our human children and grandchildren, we have one shot at raising this next generation correctly."

I am talking with De Kai, a pioneering professor of AI who built the web’s first global online language translator that spawned Google Translate and Microsoft Bing Translator, and author of new book, Raising AI: An Essential Guide to Parenting Our Future.

De Kai was honored by the Association for Computational Linguistics as one of its 17 Founding Fellows and holds joint appointments at HKUST’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering and Division of Arts and Machine Creativity, and at Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute. He is Independent Director of the AI ethics think tank The Future Society and was one of eight inaugural members of Google’s AI ethics council. So he’s helped create some of the most important mechanisms and institutions of the modern AI age.

In the conclusion of our interview, we talk about how to parent AI and what that means, responsibilities of the AI companies, a kind of parent-teacher association for AI and how to get involved, and our responsibilities to the next generation.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

As AI becomes more and more powerful, what is our responsibility, collectively? I am joined by De Kai, a pioneering professor of AI who built the web’s first global online language translator that spawned Google Translate and Microsoft Bing Translator. And he has answered those questions with his new book, Raising AI: An Essential Guide to Parenting Our Future.

De Kai was honored by the Association for Computational Linguistics as one of its 17 Founding Fellows and holds joint appointments at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering and Division of Arts and Machine Creativity, and at Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute. He is Independent Director of the AI ethics think tank The Future Society and was one of eight inaugural members of Google’s AI ethics council. So he’s helped create some of the most important mechanisms and institutions of the modern AI age.

We talk about why we should parent AI, the existential issues that drove him to write the book, seeing AI as neuro-atypical, and the architecture and features of AI that are important to consider in how we relate to it.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Welcome to a joint episode with the London Futurists podcast, hosted by David Wood and Calum Chace, who have both been individual guests on this show in the past. 

David is chair of the London Futurists and named by T3 as one of the 100 most influential people in technology. He is author of the books, “The Singularity Principles: Anticipating and managing cataclysmically disruptive technologies” and more recently, “The Death of Death.”  Calum is the author of "Surviving AI: The promise and peril of artificial intelligence," and "The Economic Singularity: Artificial intelligence and the death of capitalism." He was recently ranked sixth in a list of the world’s top futurist professionals by Global Gurus TOP30.

Together, David and Calum are key players at a new company called Conscium, which describes itself as “the world’s first applied AI consciousness research organisation.”

I follow every episode of the London Futurists podcast and I recommend you do too. There’s a link to it in the show notes and transcript. And if you can attend any of the London Futurists meetings, they are very useful and thought-provoking, and many of them are online and free.

We are all talking together today about AI agents, AI safety and security, its effects on social cohesion and communication, and decentralization of control.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.