Artificial Intelligence and You

When people take a unipolar position that AI is going to be wonderful, or terrible, or inconsequential, they end up painting themselves into a corner where that’s the only story they can allow themselves to express, and that obscures the truth. So for us to do our due diligence in exploring the dimensions of AI, today I am talking with Drs. Emily Bender and Alex Hanna, authors of the upcoming book, The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want, and also co-hosts of the live podcast Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000.

Emily is well known for coining the term “stochastic parrots” in a 2021 paper as a label for generative AI. She is a linguistics professor and director of the Computational Linguistics Laboratory at the University of Washington and was among the inaugural Time AI 100. Alex is a sociologist who looks at how the data that fuels AI technologies exacerbates racial, gender, and class inequality. She is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Applied Transgender Studies.

In part 1, we talk about their intentions with the book, cycles of hype and the effects of hype, the dangers of uncritical use of LLMs, “Slow Science”, and academic institutional culture. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

How to manage the integration of AI at scale into the enterprise is the territory of today's guest, Diane Gutiw, Vice President and leader of the AI research center at the global business consultancy CGI. She holds a PhD in Medical Information Technology Management and has led collaborative strategy design and implementation planning for advanced analytics and AI for large organizations in the energy and utilities, railway, and government healthcare sectors. 

In part 2, we talk about synthetic data, digital triplets, agentic AI and continuous autonomous improvement, and best practices for compliance. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

How to manage the integration of AI at scale into the enterprise is the territory of today's guest, Diane Gutiw, Vice President and leader of the AI research center at the global business consultancy CGI. She holds a PhD in Medical Information Technology Management and has led collaborative strategy design and implementation planning for advanced analytics and AI for large organizations in the energy and utilities, railway, and government healthcare sectors. 

We talk about how enterprises manage the integration of AI at the dizzying speeds of change today, where AI does and does not impact employment, how the HR department should change in those enterprises, how to deal with hallucinations, and how to manage the risks of deploying generative AI in customer solutions. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

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 national bias in models, coherent extrapolated volition – like, what is it – the risks inherent in a world of numerous different models, and using AI itself to solve some of these problems.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

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.