Artificial Intelligence and You

I’ve talked many times in the past about AI being less like the introduction of a new technology and more like the introduction of an alien species to our planet. We’re going to talk about another alien species today: teenagers. I have teen and tween girls of my own, so this is personal. And to guide us through that is Rebecca Winthrop, co-author of the book The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better and leader of the Brookings Institution Global Task Force on AI in Education. She is a senior fellow and director of their Center for Universal Education, with a PhD in education from Columbia, and researching education globally, with special attention to the skills young people need to thrive in work, life, and as constructive citizens. She advises governments, international institutions, foundations, civil society organizations, and corporations on education issues and has served as the chair of the U.N. Secretary General’s Global Education First Initiative’s Technical Advisory Group.

I may have used a frivolous line at the start there but the topic is anything but. Teenagers are on the front lines of humanity’s engaging with the effects of AI, and they feel it first and hardest. We talk about whether teens’ reaction is resilience or denial, how they’re using AI, what triage for AI in education looks like, positive uses of AI in schools but also the cheating problem and how schools are dealing with that, safeguarding kids’ use of AI, and how assessment should change.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

I have been talking with Ruchir Puri, the Chief Scientist of IBM Research, about their strategy and his take on many things related to AI. Ruchir is also Vice-President of IBM Corporate Technology and Technical Community. He led IBM Watson as its CTO and Chief Architect from 2016-19 and is a Fellow of the IEEE, and has been an ACM Distinguished Speaker, an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, and holder of the John Von Neumann Chair at the Institute of Discrete Mathematics at Bonn University in Germany. He holds over 70 US patents and has authored over 120 scientific papers.

In our interview conclusion, we talk about Watson, and what happened with using it in medicine right after its Jeopardy! win, and the current state of Watson in governance and generative AI, Ruchir’s term and definition of Artificial Useful Intelligence, his invention of CodeNet, what it means for AI to write software and an amazing potential future of that, and the prospects for entry-level positions for computer science graduates and Ruchir’s advice to them.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

In all the news about and focus on startups like OpenAI and Anthropic, there’s a long-established player that doesn’t get as many soundbites but which deserves our attention: IBM. It’s important to understand what their current strategy and thinking is. And I have just the person to do that: Ruchir Puri, the Chief Scientist of IBM Research, and Vice-President of IBM Corporate Technology and Technical Community.

He led IBM Watson as its CTO and Chief Architect from 2016-19 and is a Fellow of the IEEE, and has been an ACM Distinguished Speaker, an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, and was honored with John Von-Neumann Chair at Institute of Discrete Mathematics at Bonn University, Germany. Notably from our point of view, he is an inventor of over 70 US patents and has authored over 120 scientific papers, which lands him squarely in the technical perspective that we value so much on this show. 

We talk about the continuing importance of the foundation of computer science, which is algorithms, the tension between the deterministic nature of algorithms and the more touchy-feely variability of generative AI interfaces, what that means for reliability and verifiability, how best to think about Gen AI, the history of IBM’s big AI projects like Watson and Deep Blue, and IBM’s ambitions in quantum computing and the role of AI in that.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

I have been talking with Maurice Chiodo, Assistant Research Professor at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, about his new paper titled Reframing AI Loss of Control: What Control Is, How to Have It, How to Lose It and everything that control of AI and loss of it means. Maurice is the principal investigator of the Ethics in Mathematics Project, holds two PhDs in mathematics, from Cambridge and the University of Melbourne, and has over a decade of experience working as an academic mathematician. He has direct industry experience with over 30 startups, having been a member of the Ethics Advisory Group at Machine Intelligence Garage UK for over 2 years.

In this conclusion of the interview we talk about AI in wartime decision making, the mechanics of real-time detection of loss of control, the problems with putting a human in the loop, and some of the most serious scenarios of loss of control.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

With so much talk about the need to control AI, and notable incidents of losing control of it, like the OpenAI/HuggingFace incident among others, we will do a deep dive on what control or loss of control of AI means with the help of Maurice Chiodo, Assistant Research Professor at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, and the principal investigator of the Ethics in Mathematics Project, where he addresses the ethical challenges and risks posed by mathematics, mathematicians, and mathematically-powered technologies. Maurice holds two PhDs in mathematics, from the University of Cambridge and the University of Melbourne, and has over a decade of experience working as an academic mathematician on problems in algebra and computability theory. He has direct industry experience with over 30 startups, having been a member of the Ethics Advisory Group at Machine Intelligence Garage UK for over 2 years. But his recent paper titled Reframing AI Loss of Control: What Control Is, How to Have It, How to Lose It, forms the main reason for our interview.

We talk about ethical issues in mathematics and whether there should be a Hippocratic oath for mathematicians, AI’s impact on mathematics in solving previously unsolved problems, how to define control and losing it (using sharks as an example), and the difference between operational, tactical, and strategic goals. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

We are back on the consciousness train again, trying to understand what that thing is. So I've been talking with Joscha Bach, renowned cognitive scientist who uses the lens of artificial intelligence to understand the human mind. He has taught and researched at Humboldt University of Berlin, the Institute for Cognitive Science in Osnabrück, the Berlin School of Mind and Brain, MIT’s Media Lab and the Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. He’s the creator of the MicroPsi cognitive architecture, the author of Principles of Synthetic Intelligence, and the executive director of the California Institute for Machine Consciousness.

We conclude by talking about how to know if something is conscious, the role of memory, what Joscha thinks of Integrated Information Theory, applying the Turing Test to LLMs and whether they’re entitled to rights, substrate independence, or the portability of consciousness from one platform to another, the possibility of making a conscious AI, and the geopolitics of doing so. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

We are back on the consciousness train again, trying to understand what that thing is. Most of us would cop to being conscious, but how many of us have any idea how to describe it, let alone test for it? Here to help with that is Joscha Bach, cognitive scientist, AI researcher, and philosopher who uses the lens of artificial intelligence to understand the human mind. He has taught and researched at Humboldt University of Berlin, the Institute for Cognitive Science in Osnabrück, the Berlin School of Mind and Brain, MIT Media Lab and the Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. He’s the creator of the MicroPsi cognitive architecture and the author of Principles of Synthetic Intelligence. At Intel Labs, he led a team for cognitive AI. He is currently the executive director of the California Institute for Machine Consciousness where he draws on computer science, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy to ask how minds construct reality, how consciousness might emerge from computation, and what AI can teach us about ourselves.

We talk about the Institute’s mission, the machine consciousness hypothesis, why we actually are in a particular kind of simulation, dreaming, the role of perceptions and predictions, and a fascinating take on the Chinese Room.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

The idea of AI posing an existential risk to the human race is kind of like the Terminator itself – it just keeps coming back. We'll look at some of the history of that issue, how attitudes towards it have waxed and waned over the years, and recent events where AIs have escaped their containers and the reactions - or lack thereof - to those incidents. What should we take away from this slow-motion train wreck and what should we do about it?

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.