Artificial Intelligence and You

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.

It’s more important than ever to define just what we mean by words like intelligence, consciousness, and thinking. Here to help us is Kate Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA and the James B. Duke Professor Emerita from Duke University. Her research focuses on the relations of literature, science and technology, and her books include Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious, and How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. She has fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim, a Rockefeller Residential Fellowship at Bellagio, and two University of California Presidential Research Fellowships, and she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. We are focusing on her new book, Bacteria to AI:  Human Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts, where she lays out a new theory of mind—what she calls an integrated cognitive framework—that includes the meaning-making practices of lifeforms from bacteria to plants, animals, humans, and some forms of artificial intelligence.

In part 2, we talk about where meaning resides, for instance in poetry and literature, and how students’ attention span has changed and shortened as a result of multitasking or multiple information streams and how educational models need to change, how our cognitive symbiosis with AI might evolve, and markers of whether AI has consciousness, sentience, or deserves any individual rights.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

It’s more important than ever to define just what we mean by words like intelligence, consciousness, and thinking. Here to help us is Kate Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. Her research focuses on the relations of literature, science and technology, and a new theory of mind—what she calls an integrated cognitive framework (ICF)—that includes the meaning-making practices of lifeforms from bacteria to plants, animals, humans, and some forms of artificial intelligence. That’s the topic of her new book, Bacteria to AI:  Human Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts. A symbiont is an organism living in symbiosis with another, with a closely-coupled mutual relationship between them. Kate’s other books include Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious, and How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. She has many fellowships, including two University of California Presidential Research Fellowships, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

We talk about the relationship between cognition and consciousness, and between cognition and computation; our dependency and codependency on technology; concepts like anthropocentrism and technosymbiosis, which Kate unpacks in the service of laying out a really novel way of thinking about thinking; and whether AI is thinking, or feeling.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

We get at this AI thing from many different angles: it changes us in so many ways that we're not going to understand it through just a technical discussion. So today we look at what it means to be human in the AI age through the eyes of Dagan Shani, an independent filmmaker who has focused on the risks associated with AI through movies that evoke our emotions. His documentary Don't Look Up - The Documentary: The Case for AI as an Existential Threat was described by Max Tegmark as “the most important film of the year.” Shani’s short documentary from 2024, Moloch - AI and the Deadly Force Driving Us to the Brink, and his latest film, Obsolete - Human Work in the Age of AI, both raise pressing questions about the rapid advancement of AI and its far-reaching implications.

In part 2, we talk about Universal Basic Income, more about Moloch, and the Studio Ghibli incident and the future of AI-generated visual media. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.