Artificial Intelligence and You

We're talking about catastrophic risks, something that can be depressing for people who haven’t confronted these things before, and so I have had to be careful in talking about those with most audiences. Yet the paradox is that the more you do look at those risks, the more that effect fades, and that’s a good thing, because my guest today is someone who takes on the onerous task of thinking about and doing something about those risks every day. Seth Baum is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Global Catastrophic Risks Institute in New York, which has tackled the biggest of big problems since 2011. He is also a research affiliate at the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. He’s authored papers on pandemics, nuclear winter, and notably for our show, AI.

We talk about how it feels to work on existential threats every day, AI as a horizontal risk as well as a vertical one, near-term value versus long-term value, AI being used to change the decisions of populations or voting blocs, and AI as a dual-use technology.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

AI will transform customer service. Large language models will provide superior customer interaction, whether by web or by telephone. They’ll answer instantly, always be polite and full of energy, talk with the customer in every known language, make all the information that the customer wants out of the company personalized and accessible to that customer. All of this is provably achievable.

So where is it? Has your customer service experience gotten better as a result of AI being added... or worse? I dig into that question on this special episode.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

What if… aliens came to visit the Earth? And what does that have to do with AI? I’ve deconstructed two of my TEDx talks on this show, but before both of those I did one in 2017, and here I take that one apart.

Why didn’t I do this before? It seemed a bit… out there. Too sensationalist. Making claims that were too extravagant.

But when I was looking at it again recently, I thought, we’ve actually caught up with what I was saying there, those ideas are more acceptable than they were in 2017. So I thought this was a good time to see how it’s aged and how on point it is. I’ll go through it, give a commentary.

I'll talk about the dichotomy of AI's existential promise vs peril, what it could mean for jobs, the motivations to create general AI, and the part we all play in establishing the values of what will become tomorrow's artificial superintelligences, and examine the interesting ways these narratives have changed in the last 8 years. Plus, aliens.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

In this special episode we are focused on the military use of AI, and making it even more special, we have not one guest but nine:

• Peter Asaro, co-founder and co-chair of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control;
• Stuart Russell, Computer Science professor at UC Berkeley, renowned co-author of the leading text on AI, and influential AI Safety expert;
• Frank Sauer, head of research at the Metis Institute for Strategy and Foresight and member of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control;
• Tony Gillespie, author of Systems Engineering for Ethical Autonomous Systems, and a fellow in avionics and mission systems in the UK’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory;
• Rajiv Malhotra, author of  “Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power: 5 Battlegrounds.” and Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Center for Indic Studies at the University of Massachusetts;
• David Brin, scientist and science fiction author famous for the Uplift series and Earth;
• Roman Yampolskiy, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Louisville in Kentucky and author of AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable;
• Jaan Tallinn, founder of Skype and billionaire funder of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and the Future of Life Institute;
• Markus Anderljung, Director of Policy and Research at the Centre for the Governance of AI;

I've collected together portions of their appearances on earlier episodes of this show to create one interwoven narrative about the military use of AI. We talk about autonomy, killer drones, ethics of hands-off decision making, treaties, the perspectives of people and countries outside the major powers, risks of losing control, data center monitoring, and more. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

The use of generative AI in legal practice has been in the news since lawyers filed briefs written by AI that contained completely fictional citations. But AI has moved past those faux pas to be of real benefit, used by some judges in writing their decisions. Here with his finger on that pulse is Adam Unikowsky, partner in the Appellate & Supreme Court practice group at Jenner & Block in Washington, DC.  He handles cases in numerous subject matter areas, including administrative law, and patent law.  He has argued 12 cases in the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as numerous cases in federal courts of appeals, federal district courts, and state supreme courts. He writes a newsletter on AI in law and other legal issues. Adam graduated from Harvard Law School and clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia.

We talk about how AI could litigate or even judge cases, and whether it should, how it can emulate specific judges, the current uptake, reliability, and reputation of AI in the legal profession, the best ways to use AI in litigation and what’s driving its adoption, something AI can do that humans can’t, how politics comes in, the future roles of litigators and AI’s effects on the apprenticeship of lawyers, AI in the appellate system, and upcoming innovation in AI and the law. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

My guest has fundamentally reshaped the landscape of digital technology. Your experience of the Internet owes a large part of its identity to Tim O’Reilly, the founder, CEO, and Chairman of O’Reilly Media, the company that has been providing the picks and shovels of learning to the Silicon Valley gold rush for the past thirty-five years, a platform that has connected and informed the people at ground zero of the online revolution since before there was a World Wide Web, through every medium from books to blogs. And the man behind that company has catalyzed and promoted the great thought movements that shaped how the digital world unfolded, such as Open Source, the principle of freedom and transparency in sharing the code that makes up the moving parts of that world, notably through the Open Source Conference which was like Woodstock for developers and ran from the beginning of that era for many years and which I personally presented at many times. Named by Inc. magazine as the “Oracle of Silicon Valley,” Tim created the term “Web 2.0” to denote the shift towards the era where users like you and me participate by creating our own content, which turned into social media and which is now just part of the digital water we swim in. His 2017 book, WTF: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us explores the technological forces on our world and how to harness them for a better future.

We talk about the effects of generative AI on our work processes, what AI does to the value model of accessing information, meme stocks in the new economy, AGI, and preference alignment and market influencing leading to collective intelligence. Really.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

My guest has fundamentally reshaped the landscape of digital technology. Your experience of the Internet owes a large part of its identity to Tim O’Reilly, the founder, CEO, and Chairman of O’Reilly Media, the company that has been providing the picks and shovels of learning to the Silicon Valley gold rush for the past thirty-five years, a platform that has connected and informed the people at ground zero of the online revolution since before there was a World Wide Web, through every medium from books to blogs. And the man behind that company has catalyzed and promoted the great thought movements that shaped how the digital world unfolded, such as Open Source, the principle of freedom and transparency in sharing the code that makes up the moving parts of that world, notably through the Open Source Conference which was like Woodstock for developers and ran from the beginning of that era for many years and which I personally presented at many times. Named by Inc. magazine as the “Oracle of Silicon Valley,” Tim created the term “Web 2.0” to denote the shift towards the era where users like you and me participate by creating our own content, which turned into social media and which is now just part of the digital water we swim in. His 2017 book, WTF: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us explores the technological forces on our world and how to harness them for a better future.

We talk about intellectual property rights in the generative AI era – Taylor Swift will make an appearance again - and Tim’s conversations with Sam Altman, parallels with the evolution of Linux, comparing incentives with social media, the future of content generating work, and opportunities for entrepreneurial flowering.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

How do our brains produce thinking? My guest is an expert in cognitive neuroscience, the field that aims to answer that question. Paul Reber is professor of psychology at Northwestern University, Director of Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, and head of the Brain, Behavior, and Cognition program, focusing on human memory—how the brain encodes, stores, and retrieves information. With a PhD from Carnegie Mellon, his work has been cited over 6,000 times. He has served as Associate Editor for the journal Cortex and contributed to NIH review panels. His recent projects explore applications of memory science in skill training and cognitive aging. If we want to build AI that reproduces human intelligence, we need to understand that as well as possible.

In part 2, we talk about how to memorize something like a TED talk, the difference between human and computer memory, how humans make memories more resilient, catastrophic interference, and just how big is the human brain and can we fill it up?

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.