We shouldn’t learn the important lessons of AI through just exposition, through just descriptions, explanations, lessons, and textbooks. But because AI touches our lives down to our core where our emotions and subconscious reside, we need to be similarly touched with the important lessons that our fellow humans wish to communicate about AI through art, poetry, and, in the case of today’s guest, fiction. Mark Peres is a professor, author, and civic innovator with decades of experience teaching leadership and ethics at Johnson & Wales University. He’s just published The Accord, a powerful speculative novel exploring the relationship between a philosopher and a sentient general AI, Lyla.

I will say right now that whatever stereotypes that description is evoking in you right now – and god knows there are lots to choose from – I want you to throw them out. And you’ll soon see why as we talk about the big questions the story raises about consciousness, responsibility, and what we owe intelligent machines, the clash between universities, corporations, and government forces trying to control new technology, the growing role of AI as companion and confidant in everyday life, and the real-world headlines and classroom debates that inspired the book.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

In 2023 a global movement called Pause AI started, advocating for a pause in the development of powerful AI, and on the show we have its co-founder, Holly Elmore. Their website says “We call for a prohibition on the development of superintelligence, not lifted before there is broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably, and strong public buy-in.” Holly is the founder of the Pause AI US group, and has organized protests in their name. She was formerly an evolutionary biologist, with a PhD from Harvard.

We conclude the interview by talking about what would actually flip public opinion on AI safety, specific AI bills and regulations, why some leaders warn about risk while accelerating anyway, whether and when it would be safe to unpause, and how you can get involved. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

In 2023 a global movement called Pause AI started, advocating for a pause in the development of powerful AI, and on the show we have its co-founder, Holly Elmore. Their website says “We call for a prohibition on the development of superintelligence, not lifted before there is broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably, and strong public buy-in.” Holly is the founder of the Pause AI US group, and has organized protests in their name. She was formerly an evolutionary biologist, with a PhD from Harvard.

We talk about what the Pause movement stands for, overlaps with animal welfare strategies, why pausing is an effective aim and why we need it, the pros and cons of limiting AI training by compute metrics, and comparing AI safety to the airline industry.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

One of the great wounds people are experiencing around AI is in creativity. Look at the writers’ and actors’ strikes, for example. I continue talking about this very sensitive subject with Maya Ackerman, author of the new book Creative Machines: AI, Art, and Us, which tackles it head on, full of emotion, vulnerability, and poetry. 

Maya is the CEO and co-founder of Wave AI, and professor of Computer Science at Santa Clara University. She completed postdoctoral fellowships at Caltech and UC San Diego, and has authored over 50 peer-reviewed publications. She was named a Woman of Influence by the Silicon Valley Business Journal and her work has been featured in Forbes, NPR, Fortune, and NBC News. She is also a singer, pianist, and songwriter.

We talk about experiments in machine creativity, the distinction between creative processes and creative products and the role of the observer in the creative experience, how bias against AI shows up, and how AI that’s constructed around compassion and ethical stewardship could support deeper human flourishing in the next few years.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

One of the great wounds people are experiencing around AI is in creativity. Look at the writers’ and actors’ strikes, for example. Here to talk about this very sensitive subject is Maya Ackerman, author of the new book Creative Machines: AI, Art, and US, which tackles it head on, full of emotion, vulnerability, and poetry. 

Maya is the CEO and co-founder of Wave AI, and professor of Computer Science at Santa Clara University. She completed postdoctoral fellowships at Caltech and UC San Diego, and has authored over 50 peer-reviewed publications. She was named a Woman of Influence by the Silicon Valley Business Journal and her work has been featured in Forbes, NPR, Fortune, and NBC News. She is also a singer, pianist, and songwriter.

We talk about how Maya’s interdisciplinary backgrounds of machine learning and computational creativity converged in her book, what Maya calls “humble creative machines”: AI collaborators and how they can uplift us, her concept of a co-creative spectrum where humans are served by AI assisting us in being more creative, and – opera singing.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

The fear, uncertainty, and doubt around the future of work has reached epidemic proportions. We'll attempt to shed some light and provide some relief with data, questions, and informed speculation on the topic. How is the generation of content going to evolve, and what's awaiting us in robotics? Who will make the decisions about the future workplace, and what will happen to creatives in marketing and other fields?

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

I am talking with José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson about AI in postsecondary education, because they are authors of the new book Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning. José is leader of the Bowen Innovation Group, consulting on innovation in higher education and was the 11th president of Goucher College. He has held leadership roles at Stanford, the University of Southampton, Georgetown, Miami University, and Southern Methodist University, and his book Teaching Naked reshaped conversations about technology and pedagogy. He is an international jazz pianist and edited the Cambridge Companion to Conducting.

Eddie Watson is Vice President for Digital Innovation at the American Association of Colleges and Universities and is the Founding Director of their Institute on AI, Pedagogy, and the Curriculum.  He directed the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Georgia, and is a Fellow of the Louise McBee Institute of Higher Education.

In our conclusion, we talk about the future of textbooks, José and Eddie’s meta-analysis of AI literacy frameworks and standardizing AI literacy training, the evolution of teaching models and practices like lectures, and the future of degrees themselves.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

After last week’s exploration of AI in secondary education it’s time to look at how it’s landing in the universities, and so I am talking with José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson, authors of the brand new book Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning. José leads the Bowen Innovation Group, consulting on innovation in higher education and was the 11th president of Goucher College. He has held leadership roles at Stanford, the University of Southampton, Georgetown, Miami University, and Southern Methodist University, and his influential book Teaching Naked reshaped conversations about technology and pedagogy. He edited the Cambridge Companion to Conducting, and is an international jazz pianist.

C. Edward Watson - Eddie on our show - is Vice President for Digital Innovation at the American Association of Colleges and Universities and is the Founding Director of their Institute on AI, Pedagogy, and the Curriculum. He directed the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Georgia, and is a Fellow of the Louise McBee Institute of Higher Education.

We talk about how students and teachers are reacting to AI, threats to jobs – particularly teaching jobs – and changes to how we work, what really matters in the practice of teaching in an AI world, cheating, changes to relationships between teachers and students and the importance of caring.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

What’s going on with getting AI education into America’s classrooms? We're finding out from Jeff Riley, former Commissioner of Education for the state of Massachusetts and founder of a new organization – Day of AI, started by MIT’s Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education institute. And they are mounting a campaign called Responsible AI for America’s Youth, which is now running across all 50 states and will run an event called America’s Youth AI Festival in July 2026 in Boston.

Jeff has got master’s degrees from Johns Hopkins and Harvard. He was a Boston school principal and as commissioner, successfully navigated Massachusetts schools through Covid and other crises.

In our conclusion, we talk about how Jeff sees the AI education of teachers evolving, responsible use of AI by students, differentiated learning, making AI in classrooms safe for teachers and students, the impact of AI on educational inequalities, the future of educational reform, and how you can get involved in AI in schools. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

What’s going on with getting AI education into America’s classrooms? We’re going to find out from Jeff Riley, former Commissioner of Education for the state of Massachusetts and founder of a new organization – Day of AI, started by MIT’s Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education institute. And they are mounting a campaign called Responsible AI for America’s Youth, which is now running across all 50 states and will run an event called America’s Youth AI Festival in July 2026 in Boston.

Jeff has got master’s degrees from Johns Hopkins and Harvard. He was a Boston school principal and as commissioner, successfully navigated Massachusetts schools through Covid and other crises.

We talk about what the campaign is doing and how teachers are responding to it, risks of AI and social media to kids, what to do about cheating and AI detectors, and much more!

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

It's that time to visit the - ghosts? - of AI past, present, and future, in our traditional retrospective/predictions episode. Forming the panel are Dan Turchin, CEO of PeopleReign, the AI platform automating HR and host of the “AI and the Future of Work” podcast. And Richard Foster-Fletcher, the Founder and Executive Chair of MKAI, the inclusive Artificial Intelligence Community, and leader of the MKAI Centre for Digital Trust and host of the Boundless podcast. Both have been on the show before, as guest experts and year-end panelists, and both are good friends.

We'll talk about surprises from 2025, ways companies have used AI productively and ways it has been oversold, whether an AI bubble may pop next year, what'll happen next with AI slop, and how much AI may advance human progress next year and the emergence of AI nation states.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

What is consciousness? That’s a profound question that many would say is unanswerable. And how could you make artificial consciousness? That’s a more profound question that many would say is impossible. We are talking with Suzanne Gildert, founder of Nirvanic, a Quantum-AI research company, who is not just talking about consciousness, she’s doing something about it. She is a prolific inventor with more than 60 US patents in quantum computing, humanoid robotics and artificial intelligence.  Suzanne has a PhD in experimental quantum physics and was the founder of two robot companies, Kindred AI, and Sanctuary AI. At Nirvanic she seeks to understand consciousness and innovate conscious AI using quantum computing.

In the conclusion of our interview, we talk about how robots will use quantum computing, world models and what robots really can and can’t do right now, form factors for robots, and the connection between robot consciousness and finding our purpose in the world.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

What is consciousness? That’s a profound question that many would say is unanswerable. And how could you make artificial consciousness? That’s a more profound question that many would say is impossible. Tackling both of those head-on is Suzanne Gildert, founder of Nirvanic, a Quantum-AI research company. She’s not just talking about consciousness, she’s doing something about it. She is a prolific inventor with more than 60 US patents in quantum computing, humanoid robotics and artificial intelligence.  Suzanne has a PhD in experimental quantum physics – I mean, how cool is that - and was the founder of two robot companies, Kindred AI, and Sanctuary AI. At Nirvanic she seeks to understand consciousness and innovate conscious AI using quantum computing.

We talk about quantum computing and consciousness, the nature of reality and its connection to quantum physics, the Observer Effect and Schrödinger’s Box, panpsychism, the state of the art of quantum computing, quantum supremacy, the present and future of general purpose robotics, and the connection between reward functions and the consciousness of the universe.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

What if artificial superintelligence - ASI - could be made both more safe and more profitable? I'm talking with Craig Kaplan, who has the website superintelligence.com, about his concept of "democratic AI." Craig is CEO and founder of iQ Company, focused on AGI and ASI. He also founded and ran PredictWallStreet, a financial services firm which used AI to power a top hedge fund. 

Craig is a former visiting professor in computer science at the University of California, and earned master’s and doctoral degrees from famed robotics hub Carnegie Mellon University, where he co-authored research with the Nobel-Prize-winning economist and AI pioneer Dr. Herbert A. Simon.

In part 2, we talk about rights of AIs, safe superintelligence, where AI gets its values, and how model vendors might be incentivized to put their products into the collective AI intelligence.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

What if artificial superintelligence - ASI - could be made both more safe and more profitable? Returning to the show after a year is Craig Kaplan, talking about how "democratic AI" can do that. Craig, who has the website superintelligence.com, is CEO and founder of iQ Company, focused on AGI and ASI. He also founded and ran PredictWallStreet, a financial services firm which used AI to power a top hedge fund. 

Craig is a former visiting professor in computer science at the University of California, and earned master’s and doctoral degrees from famed robotics hub Carnegie Mellon University, where he co-authored research with the Nobel-Prize-winning economist and AI pioneer Dr. Herbert A. Simon.

We talk about democratic AI, a kind of a hive mind of AIs that combine to work together safely, and how do they talk to each other, what are they made up of, and we’ll also talk about systems for solving ethical problems. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

How should AI change democracy? That’s the topic of Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship, and I am continuing my talk with its authors. Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist and the bestselling author of fourteen books, including Data and Goliath and A Hacker’s Mind.  Nathan Sanders is a data scientist who has served in fellowships and the Massachusetts legislature and the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard. He writes in The New York Times and The Atlantic.

We talk about whether wealthy entities might subvert the use of AI in democracy, how smaller countries are engaging with AI in government, the utility of open weight and open source models, digital twins in government, the future of surveillance, and what makes Bruce and Nathan optimistic about the future.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

How should AI change democracy? That’s the topic of Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship, and I am talking today with its authors. Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist and the bestselling author of fourteen books, including Data and Goliath and A Hacker’s Mind. He is a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Chief of Security Architecture at Inrupt. Nathan Sanders is a data scientist researching machine learning, astrophysics, public health, environmental justice, and more. He has served in fellowships and the Massachusetts legislature and the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard. He writes on AI and democracy in The New York Times and The Atlantic.

We talk about this fascinating and scary intersection of AI and government, of AI being used in making legislation, the concept of democracy as an information system, ways AI can transform how citizens engage their governments, regulatory responses to AI from the US and around the world, and how the judicial branch can use AI. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

What's really going on in classrooms with AI right now? I'm talking with Gerry White, a teacher, technologist, writer, and lifelong learner who has spent two decades at the forefront of education and technology integration. Gerry is the Dean of Academic Technology at ECPI University in Virginia and the founder of MyTutorPlus, an AI-powered tutoring platform designed to personalize education for learners of all ages. From building over 70 apps to creating immersive AR and VR experiences, his work bridges the gap between the humanities and technology. His Substack articles and books unpack the ethical, emotional, and societal consequences of AI.

We talk about how cultural bias in GenAI affects the classroom, what school leadership should be doing, AI in group work, assessment, how AI might accelerate learning and augment the human experience, interactions with parents, and kids’ social uses of AI, all in the context of real experiences in school.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

We're continuing to focus on AI in education because it's so pivotal to the future of the human race. What's really going on in classrooms with AI right now? We are learning that from Gerry White, a teacher, technologist, writer, and lifelong learner who has spent two decades at the forefront of education and technology integration. Gerry is the Dean of Academic Technology at ECPI University in Virginia and the founder of MyTutorPlus, an AI-powered tutoring platform designed to personalize education for learners of all ages. From building over 70 apps to creating immersive AR and VR experiences, his work bridges the gap between the humanities and technology. His Substack articles and books unpack the ethical, emotional, and societal consequences of AI.

We’re going to talk about how generative AI first showed up in Gerry’s classrooms, the importance of preserving students’ voices, confronting the cheating and plagiarism problems, optimal ways of engaging students’ use of AI, and finding the unique value of humans in the workplace, all in the context of real experiences in real classes.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Students using AI to cheat on homework - or being inaccurately flagged as cheating - falls under the heading of 'academic integrity,' so I am talking with Alyson King, Professor in Political Science at Ontario Tech University in Canada, and editor of the new book, “Artificial Intelligence, Pedagogy and Academic Integrity,” containing 12 contributors’ thoughts and research on the problem of maintaining academic integrity in a world where AI can complete virtually any school assignment at a passing grade or higher. 

Alyson earned her PhD in the History of Education at the University of Toronto and currently she engages in research intended to better understand student experiences and academic integrity. In her teaching, she includes topics related to Indigenous experiences and worldviews, such as Residential Schools, and has designed a course about the politics of Indigenous Rights.

We’re going to talk about teachers getting to know their students’ voices, AI detectors, and the place of AI in education.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Students using AI to cheat on homework - or being inaccurately flagged as cheating - falls under the heading of 'academic integrity,' so I am talking with Alyson King, Professor in Political Science at Ontario Tech University in Canada, and editor of the new book, “Artificial Intelligence, Pedagogy and Academic Integrity,” containing 12 contributors’ thoughts and research on the problem of maintaining academic integrity in a world where AI can complete virtually any school assignment at a passing grade or higher. 

Alyson earned her PhD in the History of Education at the University of Toronto and currently she engages in research intended to better understand student experiences and academic integrity. In her teaching, she includes topics related to Indigenous experiences and worldviews, such as Residential Schools, and has designed a course about the politics of Indigenous Rights.

We’re going to talk about plagiarism, AI-proofing assignments, motivating students, threats to critical thinking, and much more.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

We are again focusing on AI in education, because that is really where the rubber meets the road for nearly every issue in AI and where we need to get it right, because that’s where we’re training the generation that will save the world. You could be very pessimistic about that, but you can also be very optimistic about that, and one person who is optimistic is Becky Keene, an educator, author, and speaker focused on innovative teaching and learning, and author of the new book, AI Optimism, about all the good possibilities of AI in education. She specializes in instructional coaching, game-based learning, and integrating AI into education to empower students as creators.

We talk about the conflict between fear and hope about AI in education, changing our focus from product to process, how to reshape education to leverage AI, what role school leadership should play, and much more.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

As we use AI more and more as a critical assistant, what might that be doing to our critical thinking? Professor Michael Gerlich has published his research in the paper “AI Tools In Society: Impacts On Cognitive Offloading And The Future Of Critical Thinking” in the journal Societies. He showed that younger participants “exhibited higher dependence on AI tools and lower critical thinking scores compared to older participants.” That’s the sort of result that demands we pay attention at a time when AI is being increasingly used by schools and students.

Michael is the Head of Center for Strategic Corporate Foresight and Sustainability at SBS Swiss Business School. His research and publications largely focus on the societal impact of Artificial Intelligence, which has made him in demand as a speaker around the world. He’s also taught at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Cambridge, and other institutions. He’s also been an adviser to the President and the Prime Minister of Kyrgyzstan, the Uzbekistan Cabinet, and Ministers of economic affairs in Azerbaijan.

In part 2, we talk about whether or how we can tell that our cognition has been impaired, how the future of work will change with cognitive offloading and what employers need to beware of and leverage.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

As we use AI more and more as a critical assistant, what might that be doing to our critical thinking? Professor Michael Gerlich has published his research in the paper “AI Tools In Society: Impacts On Cognitive Offloading And The Future Of Critical Thinking” in the journal Societies. He showed that younger participants “exhibited higher dependence on AI tools and lower critical thinking scores compared to older participants.” That’s the sort of result that demands we pay attention at a time when AI is being increasingly used by schools and students.

Michael is the Head of Center for Strategic Corporate Foresight and Sustainability at SBS Swiss Business School. His research and publications largely focus on the societal impact of Artificial Intelligence, which has made him in demand as a speaker around the world. He’s also taught at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Cambridge, and other institutions. He’s also been an adviser to the President and the Prime Minister of Kyrgyzstan, the Uzbekistan Cabinet, and Ministers of economic affairs in Azerbaijan.

We talk about “cognitive offloading” and the use of GenAI. Why is it different from using calculators, which were widely forecast to cause math skills to atrophy and were banned from schools, and we since learned better. Michael will look at how AI like the big agents that might come with workplace IT systems help or hinder in knowledge work, and consequences for on-the-job training.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

"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.  

In the conclusion, we talk about the links between innovation and industry productivity, why AI hasn’t yet delivered broad gains, automation’s uneven effects on workers, the role of antitrust in sustaining competition, and the need for institutions like Oxford to adapt.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

"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.

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.

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 latest film, Obsolete - Human Work in the Age of AI, raises pressing questions about the rapid advancement of AI. 

We talk about Moloch, which is the legendary personification of competition that drives us to be our worst selves, and the subject of Shani’s short documentary from 2024, Moloch - AI and the Deadly Force Driving Us to the Brink. We also talk about game theory, AI hype, impact on jobs, and AI in movie making.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

How do you deal personally, and organizationally, with exponential change? That’s the subject of a new book, Super Shifts: Transforming How We Live, Learn, And Work In The Age Of Intelligence, and both of its authors are here. Dr. Ja-Naé Duane is a behavioral scientist who has worked with companies such as PWC, Saudi Aramco, AIG, and Deloitte. She is a member of the Loomis Council at the Stimson Center, collaborator with the National Institute of Health, and holds appointments at Brown University and MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research. Steve Fisher co-founded the Futures Practice at McKinsey & Company and is the Managing Partner of the consultancy Revolution Factory. At FTI Consulting, he led the adoption of Generative AI for business model transformation, and is Chief Futurist at the Human Frontier Institute. Together, they have previously authored the bestseller The Startup Equation.

In the conclusion of the interview, we’re going to talk about Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, AI’s future enhancements to our lives, the different new species of humans that will emerge, and how the educational system needs to evolve.

Steve and Ja-Naé have extended a special offer to the listeners of this show, to get two chapters of their book free via this link.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

How do you deal personally, and organizationally, with exponential change? That’s the subject of a new book, Super Shifts: Transforming How We Live, Learn, And Work In The Age Of Intelligence, and both of its authors are here. Dr. Ja-Naé Duane is a behavioral scientist who has worked with companies such as PWC, Saudi Aramco, AIG, and Deloitte. She is a member of the Loomis Council at the Stimson Center, collaborator with the National Institute of Health, and holds appointments at Brown University and MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research. Steve Fisher co-founded the Futures Practice at McKinsey & Company and is the Managing Partner of the consultancy Revolution Factory. At FTI Consulting, he led the adoption of Generative AI for business model transformation, and is Chief Futurist at the Human Frontier Institute. Together, they have previously authored the bestseller The Startup Equation.

This week, we’re going to talk about what shaped their careers in this work, the definition of a super shift and how people react to them over different timescales, human patterns of change, how a family might be dealing with all this in 15 years, and… opera.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

What does the ideal integration of humans and technology look like in business in the future? Nada Sanders calls that a “Humachine.” She is a thought leader and expert in forecasting and human-technology integration, has an MBA and a PhD in supply chain management, and is an expert in digital transformation. She is author of seven books, including The Humachine: Humankind, Machines, and the Future of Enterprise, and is a Fellow of the Decision Sciences Institute. In 2022 she was awarded the prestigious Robert D. Klein Lecturer Award by Northeastern University.

In part 2, we talk about intentionality, integration, implementation, and indication, what to digitize in digital transformation, KPIs and other indicators of success in an AI-first business, and how culture needs to shift in the enterprise.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

What does the ideal integration of humans and technology look like in business in the future? Nada Sanders calls that a “Humachine.” She is a thought leader and expert in forecasting and human-technology integration, has an MBA and a PhD in supply chain management, and is an expert in digital transformation. She is author of seven books, including The Humachine: Humankind, Machines, and the Future of Enterprise, and is a Fellow of the Decision Sciences Institute. In 2022 she was awarded the prestigious Robert D. Klein Lecturer Award by Northeastern University.

In part 1, Nada defines the Humachine, and we talk about the ideal relationship between humans and AI, Kasparov’s Law, what skills have atrophied in the younger workforce, how software jobs are changing, and where to set the boundary between AI assistants and human assistants.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

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 2, we talk about the dangers of uncritical naming, anthropomorphizing, Luddites and bespoke crafting, the effects of synthetic content on interpersonal communications, capitalism, and collective action strategies. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

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.

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.

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 1, we talk about distinguishing neuroscience from cognitive neuroscience, the physical structure of the brain, how we learn physical skills, comparing the brain to AI, and foundational problems in neuroscience.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

On the recent wrap-up/predictions panel we had so much fascinating discussion about AI in religion with panelist Beth Singler that I said we should have her back on the show by herself to talk about that, so here she is!

Beth is the Assistant Professor in Digital Religions and co-lead of the Media Existential Encounters and Evolving Technology Lab at the University of Zurich, where she leads projects on religion and AI. As an anthropologist, her research addresses the human, religious, cultural, social, and ethical implications of developments in AI and robotics.  She received the 2021 Digital Religion Research Award from the Network for New Media, Religion, and Digital Culture Studies. Her popular science communication work includes a series of award-winning short documentaries on AI. She is co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to Religion and AI, and author of Religion and AI: An Introduction, both published last year. 

In part 2, we talk about Roko’s Basilisk, which is a concept that changes your life the moment you find out what it is, experiences of AI saying that it’s a God, the reverse Garland test (that’s based on ex Machina), simulation theories starting with Plato’s Cave, more chatbot priests, how Beth does research, and… Battlestar Galactica.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

On the recent wrap-up/predictions panel we had so much fascinating discussion about AI in religion with panelist Beth Singler that I said we should have her back on the show by herself to talk about that, so here she is!

Beth is the Assistant Professor in Digital Religions and co-lead of the Media Existential Encounters and Evolving Technology Lab at the University of Zurich, where she leads projects on religion and AI. As an anthropologist, her research addresses the human, religious, cultural, social, and ethical implications of developments in AI and robotics.  She received the 2021 Digital Religion Research Award from the Network for New Media, Religion, and Digital Culture Studies. Her popular science communication work includes a series of award-winning short documentaries on AI. She is co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to Religion and AI, and author of Religion and AI: An Introduction, both published last year. 

In part 1, we talk about why religion and AI is a thing and what its dimensions are, the influence of science fiction, tropes like End Times, AI used in religious roles, and the Singularity.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Continuing our exploration of AI in education, I am joined by Nick Potkalitsky, founder of Pragmatic AI Solutions and co-author of AI in Education: A Roadmap For Teacher-Led Transformation. With a doctorate in narrative and rhetorical studies, he leads AI curriculum integration at The Miami Valley School and develops pioneering AI literacy programs. His Substack “Educating AI” offers curriculum guidance and expert insights.

We talk about how AI has landed emotionally for teachers, whether there’s a generational divide in the different reactions teachers have had to AI, how students are using AI tools and the homework problem, the changing landscape of policies in schools, how university requirements are evolving, and the teacher-led transformation of education that Nick foresees.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Virtually every issue around AI – pro, con, in-between – is reflected in education right now. And teachers are on the front lines of this disruption. So it’s especially important that UNESCO – that’s the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization - has developed an AI Competency Framework for Teachers, and here to talk about that and his other work is the co-author of that framework, Mutlu Cukurova, professor of Learning and Artificial Intelligence at University College London. He investigates human-AI complementarity in education, aiming to address the pressing socio-educational challenge of preparing people for a future with AI systems that will require a great deal more than the routine cognitive skills currently prized by many education systems and traditional approaches to automation with AI. He is part of UCL's Grand Challenges on Transformative Technologies group, was named in Stanford’s Top 2% Scientists List, and is editor of the British Journal of Educational Technology and Associate Editor of the International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction.

In part 2, we talk about how the competency framework helps teachers use large language models, intelligent tutoring systems, the distinctions between human and machine intelligence, how to find the place to be human in a world of expanding AI capabilities, and the opportunities for teachers in this world.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Virtually every issue around AI – pro, con, in-between – is reflected in education right now. And teachers are on the front lines of this disruption. So it’s especially important that UNESCO – that’s the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization - has developed an AI Competency Framework for Teachers, and here to talk about that and his other work is the co-author of that framework, Mutlu Cukurova, professor of Learning and Artificial Intelligence at University College London. He investigates human-AI complementarity in education, aiming to address the pressing socio-educational challenge of preparing people for a future with AI systems that will require a great deal more than the routine cognitive skills currently prized by many education systems and traditional approaches to automation with AI. He is part of UCL's Grand Challenges on Transformative Technologies group, was named in Stanford’s Top 2% Scientists List, and is editor of the British Journal of Educational Technology and Associate Editor of the International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction.

We talk about the role of UNESCO with respect to AI in education, societal and ethical issues of large language models in developing countries, the types of competencies assessed in classrooms that are affected by AI, what the AI Competency Framework for Teachers is, and how to use it.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Few institutions are under as much pressure today as journalism and news publishing, and AI features squarely in the middle of those pressures. Disinformation, social media, automated news generation, the list goes on; we’re talking about the fabric of our information society. Here to help us understand these issues is Neil Brown, former editor and vice president of the Tampa Bay Times while they won six Pulitzers, and president of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. For over 50 years Poynter has trained journalists and protected the ethical standards of the industry through mechanisms like the International Fact-Checking Network and the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership. Neil spent four decades as a journalist, launched PolitiFact.com, and was co-chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board. His mission is to strengthen democracy and confront society's most complex problems by improving the value of journalism and increasing media literacy, so we are very fortunate to have him on the show to field my challenging questions!

We talk about the use of AI in journalism, in writing stories, its effect on our writing standards, different levels of stories in journalism, and the potential use of AI in interactive news publishing.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Few institutions are under as much pressure today as journalism and news publishing, and AI features squarely in the middle of those pressures. Disinformation, social media, automated news generation, the list goes on; we’re talking about the fabric of our information society. Here to help us understand these issues is Neil Brown, former editor and vice president of the Tampa Bay Times while they won six Pulitzers, and president of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. For over 50 years Poynter has trained journalists and protected the ethical standards of the industry through mechanisms like the International Fact-Checking Network and the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership. Neil spent four decades as a journalist, launched PolitiFact.com, and was co-chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board. His mission is to strengthen democracy and confront society's most complex problems by improving the value of journalism and increasing media literacy, so we are very fortunate to have him on the show to field my challenging questions!

We talk about pressures on news organizations, the evolution of the relationship between journalism and publishing, how revenue models are changing, the impact and use of AI or psychometric analysis tools, and much more.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

In our last episode of 2024, we have our traditional end of year retrospective/prediction episode. We’ll be taking a look back over the year just ending and forward to 2025, but we’re not going to focus on technology, when GPT-5 is going to drop, etc. The space is already stuffed full of that sort of thing. We’re going to look at the time through an anthropological lens, for which I am rejoined by two former guests, anthropologist Beth Singler, who was in episodes 38 and 39, and philosopher John Zerilli, who was in episodes 78 and 79. Beth is Assistant Professor in Digital Religion(s) and co-lead of the Media Existential Encounters and Evolving Technology Lab at the University of Zurich, where she leads projects on religion and AI. Her most recent books are Religion and Artificial Intelligence and The Cambridge Companion to Religion and Artificial Intelligence. John is a Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, with a PhD in cognitive science and philosophy, and carrying out research at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. His most recent book, A Citizen’s Guide to Artificial Intelligence, was published in 2021.

We consider how AI has been reshaping public narratives and attitudes over questions like job replacement, creativity, education, law, and religion.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Here to give us insights into some of the really cool stuff Google DeepMind is doing is Alexandra Belias, Head of product policy & partnerships. She serves as a bridge between DeepMind’s product policy organization and the policy community. She previously led their international public policy work. She has an MPA in Economic Policy from LSE and is currently a tech fellow at the Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights.

We talk about Google DeepMind's science policy, the emerging network of national AI safety institutes, the tension between regulation and innovation, AlphaFold and its successors, AlphaMissense and AlphaProteo, their SynthID watermarking detection tool, reducing contrail pollution through AI, and safety frameworks for frontier AI.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

It's tough enough being a teacher in the AI age, so can you imagine what it's like training the teachers themselves? That's what Dwayne Wood, Associate Professor at National University of San Diego does. He is the Academic Program Director for the Educational Technology Master’s program there, so he’s front and center of the question of how teachers deal with AI in the classroom and has been working on addressing the current shortage of teachers.

We talk about the possible impact of AI on essential learning skills, the difference between technical and tactical competence, the in-person educational experience, and how Dwayne sees things changing in the next year.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

It's tough enough being a teacher in the AI age, so can you imagine what it's like training the teachers themselves? That's what Dwayne Wood, Associate Professor at National University of San Diego does. He is the Academic Program Director for the Educational Technology Master’s program there, so he’s front and center of the question of how teachers deal with AI in the classroom and has been working on addressing the current shortage of teachers.

We talk about the relationships between teachers and students, the shifting base of fundamental skills in an AI world, the skills needed by instructional designers, how to teach effective and safe use of generative AI, and how to place the guardrails around learners using it.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

We are going big on the show this time, with astrophysicist J. Craig Wheeler,  Samuel T. and Fern Yanagisawa Regents Professor of Astronomy, Emeritus, at the University of Texas at Austin, and author of the book The Path to Singularity: How Technology will Challenge the Future of Humanity, released on November 19. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and Legacy Fellow of the American Astronomical Society, has published nearly 400 scientific papers, authored both professional and popular books on supernovae, and served on advisory committees for NSF, NASA, and the National Research Council. His new book, spanning the range of technologies that are propelling us towards singularity from robots to space colonization, has a foreword by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who says, “The world is long overdue for a peek at the state of society and what its future looks like through the lens of a scientist. And when that scientist is also an astrophysicist, you can guarantee the perspectives shared will be as deep and as vast as the universe itself.”

We talk about the evolution of homo sapiens, high reliability organizations, brain computer interfaces, and transhumanism among other topics.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

We're extending the conversation about AI in education to the front lines in this episode, with four very experienced and credentialed educators discussing their experiences and insights into AI in schools.

• Jose Luis Navarro IV is the leading coach and consultant at the Navarro Group. He previously served as a Support Coordinator, leading innovative reforms in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
• Zack Kleypas is Superintendent of Schools in Thorndale, Texas, and named 2023 Texas Secondary Principal of the Year by the Texas Association of Secondary School Principals.
• Jeff Austin is a former high school teacher and principal who now works as a coach for Teacher Powered Schools and Los Angeles Education Partnership.
• And Jose Gonzalez, Chief Technology Officer for the Los Angeles County Office of Education and former Vice Mayor of the city of Cudahy near Los Angeles.

In the conclusion, we talk about whether students need to read as much as they used to now they have AI, fact checking, some disturbing stories about the use of AI detectors in schools, where the panel sees these trends evolving to, what they’re doing to help students learn better in an AI world, and… Iron Man.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

We're extending the conversation about AI in education to the front lines in this episode, with four very experienced and credentialed educators discussing their experiences and insights into AI in schools.

• Jose Luis Navarro IV is the leading coach and consultant at the Navarro Group. He previously served as a Support Coordinator, leading innovative reforms in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
• Zack Kleypas is Superintendent of Schools in Thorndale, Texas, and named 2023 Texas Secondary Principal of the Year by the Texas Association of Secondary School Principals.
• Jeff Austin is a former high school teacher and principal who now works as a coach for Teacher Powered Schools and Los Angeles Education Partnership.
• And Jose Gonzalez, Chief Technology Officer for the Los Angeles County Office of Education and former Vice Mayor of the city of Cudahy near Los Angeles.

We talk about how much kids were using GenAI without our knowing, how to turn GenAI in schools from a threat to an opportunity, the issue of cheating with ChatGPT, the discrepancy between how many workers are using AI and how many teachers are using it, how rules get made, confirmation bias and AI, using tools versus gaining competencies, and whether teachers will quit.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Digital Humanities sounds at first blush like a contradiction of terms: the intersection of our digital, technology-centric culture, and the humanities, like arts, literature, and philosophy. Aren't those like oil and water? But my guest illustrates just how important this discipline is by illuminating both of those fields from viewpoints I found fascinating and very different from what we normally encounter.

Professor Caroline Bassett is the first Director of Cambridge Digital Humanities, an interdisciplinary research center in Cambridge University. She is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College and researches digital technologies and cultural change with a focus on AI. She co-founded the Sussex Humanities Lab and at Cambridge she inaugurated the Masters of Philosophy in Digital Humanities and last month launched the new doctoral programme in Digital Humanities.

In the conclusion, we talk about how technology shapes our psychology, how it enables mass movements, science fiction, the role of big Silicon Valley companies, and much more.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Digital Humanities sounds at first blush like a contradiction of terms: the intersection of our digital, technology-centric culture, and the humanities, like arts, literature, and philosophy. Aren't those like oil and water? But my guest illustrates just how important this discipline is by illuminating both of those fields from viewpoints I found fascinating and very different from what we normally encounter.

Professor Caroline Bassett is the first Director of Cambridge Digital Humanities, an interdisciplinary research center in Cambridge University. She is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College and researches digital technologies and cultural change with a focus on AI. She co-founded the Sussex Humanities Lab and at Cambridge she inaugurated the Masters of Philosophy in Digital Humanities and last month launched the new doctoral programme in Digital Humanities.

In part 1 we talk about what digital humanities is, how it intersects with AI, what science and the humanities have to learn from each other, Joseph Weizenbaum and the reactions to his ELIZA chatbot, Luddites, and how passively or otherwise we accept new technology. Caroline really made me see in particular how what she calls "technocratic rationality," a way of thinking borne out of a technological culture accelerated by AI, reduces the novelty which we can experience in the world in a way we should certainly preserve.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Cognitive architecture deals in models of how the brain - or AI - does its magic. A challenging discipline to say the least, and we are lucky to have a foremost cognitive architect on the show in the person of John Laird. Is cognitive architecture the gateway to artificial general intelligence?

John is Principal Cognitive Architect and co-director of the Center for Integrated Cognition. He received his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in 1985, working with famed early AI pioneer Allen Newell. He is the John L. Tishman Emeritus Professor of Engineering at the University of Michigan, where he was a faculty member for 36 years. He is a Fellow of AAAI, ACM, AAAS, and the Cognitive Science Society. In 2018, he was co-winner of the Herbert A. Simon Prize for Advances in Cognitive Systems.

We talk about relationships between cognitive architectures and AGI, where explainability and transparency come in, Turing tests, where we could be in 10 years, how to recognize AGI, metacognition, and the SOAR architecture.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Cognitive architecture deals in models of how the brain - or AI - does its magic. A challenging discipline to say the least, and we are lucky to have a foremost cognitive architect on the show in the person of John Laird. Is cognitive architecture the gateway to artificial general intelligence?

John is Principal Cognitive Architect and co-director of the Center for Integrated Cognition. He received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 1985, working with famed early AI pioneer Allen Newell. He is the John L. Tishman Emeritus Professor of Engineering at the University of Michigan, where he was a faculty member for 36 years. He is a Fellow of AAAI, ACM, AAAS, and the Cognitive Science Society. In 2018, he was co-winner of the Herbert A. Simon Prize for Advances in Cognitive Systems.

We talk about decision loops, models of the mind, symbolic versus neural models, and how large language models do reasoning.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

My guest today founded the United Kingdom's AI in Education initiative, but Sir Anthony Seldon is known to millions more there as the author of books about prime ministers, having just published one about Liz Truss.

Sir Anthony is one of Britain’s leading contemporary historians, educationalists, commentators and political authors. For 20 years he was a transformative headmaster (“principal” in North American lingo) first at Brighton College and then Wellington College, one of the country’s leading independent schools. From 2015 to 2020 he served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham. He is now head of Epsom College. He is the author or editor of over 35 books on contemporary history, including insider accounts on the last six prime ministers. In 2018 he wrote The Fourth Education Revolution, which anticipates stunning, unprecedented effects of AI on education. He was knighted in 2014 for services to education and modern political history. 

Managing to avoid nearly all the potential Truss references, I talked with him about how teachers should think about the size of the impact of AI on education, the benefits of AI to students and teachers, what the AI in Education initiative is doing, and what the best role of teachers in the classroom is in the AI age.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

How is work shifting from jobs to skills, and how do companies and individuals adapt to this AI-fueled change? I talk with Ravin Jesuthasan, co-author with Tanuj Kapilashrami of the new book, The Skills-Powered Organization: The Journey to The Next Generation Enterprise, released on October 1.

Ravin is Senior Partner and Global Leader for Transformation Services at Mercer. He is a member of the World Economic Forum's Future Skills Executive Board and of the Global Foresight Network. He is the author of the bestselling books Work without Jobs, as well as the books Transformative HR, Lead the Work, and Reinventing Jobs.

He was featured on PBS’s documentary series “Future of Work,” has been recognized as one of the top 8 future of work influencers by Tech News, and as one of the top 100 HR influencers by HR Executive.

In the conclusion, we talk about how AI is reshaping HR functions, including hiring, staffing, and restructuring processes, the role of AI in mentoring and augmenting work, the relationship between the future of work and the future of education, the real value of a degree today, and how AI affects privilege and inequality in the new work environment.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

How is work shifting from jobs to skills, and how do companies and individuals adapt to this AI-fueled change? I talk with Ravin Jesuthasan, co-author with Tanuj Kapilashrami of the new book, The Skills-Powered Organization: The Journey to The Next Generation Enterprise, released on October 1.

Ravin is a futurist and authority on the future of work, human capital, and AI, and is Senior Partner and Global Leader for Transformation Services at Mercer. He is a member of the World Economic Forum's Future Skills Executive Board and of the Global Foresight Network. He is the author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller Work without Jobs, as well as the books Transformative HR, Lead the Work, and Reinventing Jobs.

Ravin was featured on PBS’s documentary series “Future of Work,” has been recognized as one of the top 8 future of work influencers by Tech News, and as one of the top 100 HR influencers by HR Executive.

In this first part, we talk about the impact of AI on work processes, the role of HR in adapting to these changes, and the evolving organizational models that focus on agility, flexibility, and skill-based work transitions. We also discuss AI's role in healthcare, and the importance of transferable skills in an AI-driven world.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Artificial General Intelligence - AGI - an AI system that’s as intelligent as an average human being in all the ways that human beings are usually intelligent. Helping us understand what it means and how we might get there is Craig A. Kaplan, founder of iQ Company, where he invents advanced intelligence systems. He also founded and ran PredictWallStreet, a financial services firm whose clients included NASDAQ, TD Ameritrade, Schwab, and other well-known financial institutions. In 2018, PredictWallStreet harnessed the collective intelligence of millions of retail investors to power a top 10 hedge fund performance, and we talk about it in this episode.

Craig is a visiting professor in computer science at the University of California, and earned master’s and doctoral degrees from famed robotics hub Carnegie Mellon University, where he co-authored research with the Nobel-Prize-winning economist and AI pioneer Dr. Herbert A. Simon.

In the conclusion of the interview, we talk about the details of the collective intelligence architecture of agents, why Craig says it’s safe, morality of superintelligence, the risks of bad actors, and leading indicators of AGI. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Artificial General Intelligence - AGI - an AI system that’s as intelligent as an average human being in all the ways that human beings are usually intelligent. Helping us understand what it means and how we might get there is Craig A. Kaplan, founder of iQ Company, where he invents advanced intelligence systems. He also founded and ran PredictWallStreet, a financial services firm whose clients included NASDAQ, TD Ameritrade, Schwab, and other well-known financial institutions. In 2018, PredictWallStreet harnessed the collective intelligence of millions of retail investors to power a top 10 hedge fund performance, and we talk about it in this episode.

Craig is a visiting professor in computer science at the University of California, and earned master’s and doctoral degrees from famed robotics hub Carnegie Mellon University, where he co-authored research with the Nobel-Prize-winning economist and AI pioneer Dr. Herbert A. Simon.

We talk about his work with Herb Simon, bounded rationality, connectionist vs symbolic architectures, jailbreaking large language models, collective intelligence architectures for AI, and a lot more!

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

We are talking about international governance of AI again today, a field that is just growing and growing as governments across the globe grapple with the seemingly intractable idea of regulating something they don’t understand. Helping them understand that is Markus Anderljung, Director of Policy and Research at the Centre for the Governance of AI in the UK. He aims to produce rigorous recommendations for governments and AI companies, researching frontier AI regulation, responsible cutting-edge development, national security implications of AI, and compute governance. He is an Adjunct Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, and a member of the OECD AI Policy Observatory’s Expert Group on AI Futures. He was previously seconded to the UK Cabinet Office as a Senior Policy Specialist.

I know “governance” sounds really dry and a million miles away from the drama of existential threats, and jobs going away, and loss of privacy on a global scale; but governance is exactly the mechanism by which we can hope to do something about all of those things. Whenever you say, or you hear someone say, “Someone ought to do something about that,” governance is what answers that call.

In the conclusion, we talk about verification processes, ingenious schemes to verify hardware platforms, the frontier AI safety commitments, and who should set safety standards for the industry.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

We are talking about international governance of AI again today, a field that is just growing and growing as governments across the globe grapple with the seemingly intractable idea of regulating something they don’t understand. Helping them understand that is Markus Anderljung, Director of Policy and Research at the Centre for the Governance of AI in the UK. He aims to produce rigorous recommendations for governments and AI companies, researching frontier AI regulation, responsible cutting-edge development, national security implications of AI, and compute governance. He is an Adjunct Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, and a member of the OECD AI Policy Observatory’s Expert Group on AI Futures. He was previously seconded to the UK Cabinet Office as a Senior Policy Specialist.

I know “governance” sounds really dry and a million miles away from the drama of existential threats, and jobs going away, and loss of privacy on a global scale; but governance is exactly the mechanism by which we can hope to do something about all of those things. Whenever you say, or you hear someone say, “Someone ought to do something about that,” governance is what answers that call.

We talk about just what the Centre is, what it does and how it does it, and definitions of artificial general intelligence insofar as they affect governance – just what is the difference between training a system with 1025 and 1026 flops, for instance? And also in this part Markus will talk about how monitoring and verification might specifically work.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Virtually everything that’s difficult about getting computers to do work for us is in getting them to understand our question or request and in our understanding their answer. How we interact with them is the problem.

And that's where Sophie Kleber comes in. She is the UX – that’s User Experience – Director for the Future of Work at Google and an expert in ethical AI and future human-machine interaction. She deeply understands the emotional development of automated assistants, artificial intelligence, and physical spaces. Sophie develops technology that enables individuals to be their best selves. Before joining Google, Sophie held the Global Executive Creative Director role at Huge, collaborating with brands like IKEA and Thomson Reuters. She holds an MA in Communication Design and an MBA in Product Design, and is a Fulbright fellow. 

In the conclusion of our interview, we talk about about how she got into the user experience field, the emergence of a third paradigm of user interfaces, the future of smart homes, privacy, large language models coming to consumer devices, and brain-computer interfaces.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Virtually everything that’s difficult about getting computers to do work for us is in getting them to understand our question or request and in our understanding their answer. How we interact with them is the problem.

And that's where Sophie Kleber comes in. She is the UX – that’s User Experience – Director for the Future of Work at Google and an expert in ethical AI and future human-machine interaction. She deeply understands the emotional development of automated assistants, artificial intelligence, and physical spaces. Sophie develops technology that enables individuals to be their best selves. Before joining Google, Sophie held the Global Executive Creative Director role at Huge, collaborating with brands like IKEA and Thomson Reuters. She holds an MA in Communication Design and an MBA in Product Design, and is a Fulbright fellow. 

We talk about the Uncanny Valley and how we relate to computers as though they were human or inhuman, and what if they looked like Bugs Bunny. We talk about the environments and situations where some people have intimate relationships with AIs, gender stereotyping in large language models, and where emotional interactions with computers help or hinder.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Teachers all over the world right now are having similar thoughts: Is AI going to take my job? How do I deal with homework that might have been done by ChatGPT? I know, because I've talked with many teachers, and these are universal concerns.

So I'm visiting the topic of AI in education - not for the first time, not for the last. There are important and urgent issues to tackle; they become most acute at the high school level, but this episode will be useful for all levels.

The reason it's so important for me to work with schools so much as an AI change management consultant is that there's no need for teachers to fear for their jobs. They are doing the most important job on the planet right now because they are literally educating the generation that is going to save the world. And generative AI has not created a learning problem: it's created learning opportunities. It's not created a teaching problem; it's created teaching opportunities. It has, however, created an assessment problem, and I'll talk about that.

Kids need their human teachers more than ever before to model for them how to deal with disruption from technology, because change will never again happen as slowly as it does today, and all of their careers will be disrupted far more than anyone's is today. No student is going to remember something ChatGPT said for the rest of their life. The teacher’s job is to focus on the qualities that the AI cannot embody—the personal interactions that occur face to face when the teacher makes that lasting impression that inspires the student.

Let's have honest, deep, and productive conversations about these issues now. A new school year is approaching and this is the time.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Is work heading for utopia? My guest today is John Danaher, senior lecturer in law at the University of Galway and author of the 2019 book, Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World without Work, which is an amazingly broad discourse on the future of work ranging from today’s immediate issues to the different kinds of utopia – or dystopia, depending on your viewpoint – ultimately possible when automation becomes capable of replicating everything that humans do. 

John has published over 40 papers on topics including the risks of advanced AI, the meaning of life in the future of work, the ethics of human enhancement, the intersection of law and neuroscience, the utility of brain-based lie detection, and the philosophy of religion. He is co-editor of Robot Sex: Social And Ethical Implications from MIT Press, and his work has appeared in The Guardian, Aeon, and The Philosopher’s Magazine.

In the conclusion of the interview we talk about generative AI extending our minds, the Luddite Fallacy and why this time things will be different, the effects of automation on class structure, and… Taylor Swift.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Is work heading for utopia? My guest today is John Danaher, senior lecturer in law at the University of Galway and author of the 2019 book, Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World without Work, which is an amazingly broad discourse on the future of work ranging from today’s immediate issues to the different kinds of utopia – or dystopia, depending on your viewpoint – ultimately possible when automation becomes capable of replicating everything that humans do. 

John has published over 40 papers on topics including the risks of advanced AI, the meaning of life in the future of work, the ethics of human enhancement, the intersection of law and neuroscience, the utility of brain-based lie detection, and the philosophy of religion. He is co-editor of Robot Sex: Social And Ethical Implications from MIT Press, and his work has appeared in The Guardian, Aeon, and The Philosopher’s Magazine.

In the first part of the interview we talk about how much jobs may be automated and the methodology behind studies of that, the impact of automation on job satisfaction, what’s happening in academia, and much more.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Helping the British Government understand AI since 2016 is our guest, Lord Tim Clement-Jones, co-founder and co-chair of Britain's All-Party Parliamentary Group on Artificial Intelligence since 2016. He is also former Liberal Democrat House of Lords spokesperson for Science, Innovation and Technology and former Chair of the House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence which reported in 2018 with “AI in the UK: Ready Willing and Able?” and its follow-up report in 2020 “AI in the UK: No Room for Complacency.” His new book, "Living with the Algorithm: Servant or Master?: AI Governance and Policy for the Future" came out in the UK in March, with a North American release date of July 18.

In the second half, we talk about elections, including the one just held in the UK, and disinformation, what AI and robots do to the flow of capital, the effects of AI upon education and enterprise culture, privacy and making AI accountable and trustworthy.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Helping the British Government understand AI since 2016 is our guest, Lord Tim Clement-Jones, co-founder and co-chair of Britain's All-Party Parliamentary Group on Artificial Intelligence since 2016. He is also former Liberal Democrat House of Lords spokesperson for Science, Innovation and Technology and former Chair of the House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence which reported in 2018 with “AI in the UK: Ready Willing and Able?” and its follow-up report in 2020 “AI in the UK: No Room for Complacency.” His new book, "Living with the Algorithm: Servant or Master?: AI Governance and Policy for the Future" came out in the UK in March, with a North American release date of July 18.

In this first part, Tim gives a big picture of how #AI regulation has been proceeding on the global stage since before large language models were a thing, giving us the context that took us from the Asilomar Principles to today’s Hiroshima principles and the EU AI Act and the new ISO standard 42001 for AI. And we talk about long-term planning, intellectual property rights, the effects of the open letters that called for a pause or moratorium on model training, and much more.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

As the European Union AI Act rolls out, there are so many questions about what it will mean to businesses trying to navigate the incredibly volatile and complex field of AI regulation. Here to answer those questions is Antonina Burlachenko, Head of Quality and Regulatory Consulting at Star Global Consulting, calling from Poland. She explains what the Act really means for businesses and consumers, comparing it with GDPR, and providing some technical information around standards and regulations and other aspects of what it’s like for businesses to engage with the Act at a practical level. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

To help us get new and valuable insights into the future of work is Matt Beane, Assistant Professor in the Technology Management Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has spent over a decade doing extensive field research on how workers, organizations and even AI defy norms and rules in the 21st century. 

His new book: The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines, was just published by Harper Business, and he has given you a special deal as a listener, to get a free copy of the first chapter, by going to http://aiandyou.theskillcodebook.com. The book lays out a plan for us to protect our skills and by extension the human connection between experts and novices (which is the foundation of skill-building) even as AI continues to take hold in our lives.

In the conclusion, we talk more about what AIs do to the mentoring and learning pipelines in the workplace, and how education should pivot to deal with the changes to the future of work. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

To help us get new and valuable insights into the future of work is Matt Beane, Assistant Professor in the Technology Management Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has spent over a decade doing extensive field research on how workers, organizations and even AI defy norms and rules in the 21st century. 

His new book: The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines, was just published by Harper Business, and he has given you a special deal as a listener, to get a free copy of the first chapter, by going to http://aiandyou.theskillcodebook.com. The book lays out a plan for us to protect our skills and by extension the human connection between experts and novices (which is the foundation of skill-building) even as AI continues to take hold in our lives.

In this first part, we talk about how Matt studied surgeons in operating rooms for his PhD thesis and saw the effects that the introduction of a robot surgical system had in stifling the time-honored process of mentoring new surgeons, and generalized this to other fields, and observed the rise of “shadow learning,” where people bend or break the rules to get the learning they need. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

My guest is William A. Adams, technologist, philanthropist, and recorded by the Computer History Museum as one of the first Black entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. He was the first technical advisor to Microsoft’s CTO Kevin Scott and has founded and overseen global initiatives at Microsoft from XML technologies as early as 1998, to DE&I initiatives in 2015. The Leap program, with a focus on diverse hiring, was named Microsoft’s D&I Program of the year in 2020.

We talk about William’s experience creating the Leap program, its impact, the relationship between AI and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs like Leap, and creating personalized chatbots.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Our relationship with time is dysfunctional. Here to help us explore possibly the most critical effect of AI on the pace of life is Oliver Burkeman, author of the best-selling self-help book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals and former author of the psychology column “This Column Will Change Your Life” in The Guardian.

Most of us can attest to being severely overworked and with a shrinking amount of personal time left over. This is true despite the introduction into our lives of a huge amount of technology from the PC to the Internet. Why have tools like email, Google, and instant messaging not reduced our workload and stress? In fact, it’s not hard to believe that they are responsible for making those things worse. In which case, we must ask, what effect will unleashing AI – which accelerates everything it touches - have on our work life? 

This is exactly the thought space that Oliver inhabits, and his work has made a major difference in my own life. Read Oliver's posts and subscribe to his newsletter at OliverBurkeman.com.

In the conclusion of the interview, we talk about whether this is Luddism, the influence of the Silicon Valley billionaires’ pursuit of immortality, the appropriate use of AI to save us time, and what will remain constant throughout any amount of technological evolution. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Our relationship with time is dysfunctional. Here to help us explore possibly the most critical effect of AI on the pace of life is Oliver Burkeman, author of the best-selling self-help book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals and former author of the psychology column “This Column Will Change Your Life” in The Guardian.

Most of us can attest to being severely overworked and with a shrinking amount of personal time left over. This is true despite the introduction into our lives of a huge amount of technology from the PC to the Internet. Why have tools like email, Google, and instant messaging not reduced our workload and stress? In fact, it’s not hard to believe that they are responsible for making those things worse. In which case, we must ask, what effect will unleashing AI – which accelerates everything it touches - have on our work life? 

This is exactly the thought space that Oliver inhabits, and his work has made a major difference in my own life. Read Oliver's posts and subscribe to his newsletter at OliverBurkeman.com.

In this first half of the interview we talk about the parable of the rocks in the jar and how it’s a pernicious lie, the psychology of perceiving life as finite, and how technology has not changed our work stress and may be making it worse through induced demand. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Mounir Shita, CEO of Kimera Systems, is author of the upcoming book The Science of Intelligence, which contains some interesting and thought-provoking explorations of intelligence that had me thinking about Pedro Domingos’ book The Master Algorithm. We talk about theories of AGI, free will, egg smashing, and Mounir's prototype smartphone app that learned how to silence itself in a movie theater!

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

There is, perhaps, no more burning topic at the moment than the future of work, and so I am particularly grateful to welcome to the show Gary Bolles, author of The Next Rules of Work and a co-founder of eParachute.com, helping job-hunters & career changers with programs inspired by the evergreen book “What Color Is Your Parachute?” written by his father. Gary's courses on LinkedIn Learning have over 1 million learners and he is a former Silicon Valley executive and a co-founder of SoCap, the world’s largest gathering of impact entrepreneurs and investors.

Gary is adjunct Chair for the Future of Work for Singularity University, and as a partner in the consulting agency Charrette, he helps organizations, communities, educators and governments develop strategies for “what’s next.”

In the conclusion of the interview, we talk about unbossing and holacracies, how AI will impact organizational structures, fear, FOMO, and agency, and the Singularity University.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

There is, perhaps, no more burning topic at the moment than the future of work, and so I am particularly grateful to welcome to the show Gary Bolles, author of The Next Rules of Work and a co-founder of eParachute.com, helping job-hunters & career changers with programs inspired by the evergreen book “What Color Is Your Parachute?” written by his father. Gary's courses on LinkedIn Learning have over 1 million learners and he is a former Silicon Valley executive and a co-founder of SoCap, the world’s largest gathering of impact entrepreneurs and investors.

Gary is adjunct Chair for the Future of Work for Singularity University, and as a partner in the consulting agency Charrette, he helps organizations, communities, educators and governments develop strategies for “what’s next.”

In the first half of the interview, we talk about the gig economy, the new rules of work, what ChatGPT did to the job market, and an interesting concept called the community operating system.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

My guest is the co-host of the Good Robot Podcast, "Where technology meets feminism." Eleanor Drage is a Senior Research Fellow at The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge and was named in the Top 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics of 2022. She is also co-author of a recent book also called The Good Robot: Why Technology Needs Feminism. 

In this conclusion of the interview, we talk about unconscious bias, hiring standards, stochastic parrots, science fiction, and the early participation of women in computing.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

My guest is the co-host of the Good Robot Podcast, "Where technology meets feminism." Eleanor Drage is a Senior Research Fellow at The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge and was named in the Top 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics of 2022. She is also co-author of a recent book also called The Good Robot: Why Technology Needs Feminism. 

We talk about about all that, plus some quantum mechanics, saunas, ham, lesbian bacteria, and… well it’ll all make more sense when you listen.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

My guest is a really good role model for how a young person can carve out an important niche in the AI space, especially for people who aren’t inclined to the computer science side of the field. Fiona McEvoy is author of the blog YouTheData.com, with a specific focus on the intersection of technology and society. She was named as one of “30 Influential Women Advancing AI in San Francisco” by RE•WORK, and in 2020 was honored in the inaugural Brilliant Women in AI Ethics Hall of Fame, established to recognize “Brilliant women who have made exceptional contributions to the space of AI Ethics and diversity.”

We talk about her journey to becoming an influential communicator and the ways she carries that out, what it’s like for young people in this social cauldron being heated by AI, and some of the key issues affecting them. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

At the end of February there was a landmark conference in Panama City and online, the Beneficial AGI Summit. AGI of course standing for Artificial General Intelligence, the Holy Grail of AI. My guest is Jerome C. Glenn, one of the organizers and sponsors, and who has a long and storied history of pivotal leadership and contributions to addressing existential issues.

He is the co-founder and CEO of The Millennium Project on global futures research, was contracted by the European Commission to write the AGI paper for their Horizon 2025-2027 program, was the Washington, DC representative for the United Nations University as executive director of their American Council, and was instrumental in naming the first Space Shuttle the Enterprise, banning the first space weapon (the Fractional Orbital Bombardment System) in SALT II, and shared the 2022 Lifeboat Guardian Award with Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

He has over 50 years of futures research experience working for governments, international organizations, and private industry in Science & Technology Policy, Environmental Security, Economics, Education, Defense, Space, and much more. 

In this second half we talk about approaches for actually controlling the development of AGI that were developed at the conference, the AI arms race, and… why Jerome doesn’t like the term futurism. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

At the end of February there was a landmark conference in Panama City and online, the Beneficial AGI Summit. AGI of course standing for Artificial General Intelligence, the Holy Grail of AI. My guest is Jerome C. Glenn, one of the organizers and sponsors, and who has a long and storied history of pivotal leadership and contributions to addressing existential issues.

He is the co-founder and CEO of The Millennium Project on global futures research, was contracted by the European Commission to write the AGI paper for their Horizon 2025-2027 program, was the Washington, DC representative for the United Nations University as executive director of their American Council, and was instrumental in naming the first Space Shuttle the Enterprise, banning the first space weapon (the Fractional Orbital Bombardment System) in SALT II, and shared the 2022 Lifeboat Guardian Award with Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

He has over 50 years of futures research experience working for governments, international organizations, and private industry in Science & Technology Policy, Environmental Security, Economics, Education, Defense, Space, and much more. 

In this first half we talk about his recent work with groups of the United Nations General Assembly, and his decentralized approach to grassroots empowerment in both implementing AGI and working together to regulate it.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

How is our relationship with bots - robots and chatbots - evolving and what does it mean? We're talking with Eve Herold, who has a new book, Robots and the People Who Love Them: Holding on to our Humanity in an Age of Social Robots.

Eve is an award-winning science writer and consultant in the scientific and medical nonprofit space. She writes about issues at the crossroads of science and society, and has been featured in Vice, Medium, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, Prevention, The Kiplinger Report, and The Washington Post and on MSNBC, NPR, and CNN.

In this part we talk about how robots and AI can bring out the best and the worst in us, the responsibilities of roboticists, the difference between robots having emotions and our believing that they have emotions, and how this will evolve over the next decade or more.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

How is our relationship with bots - robots and chatbots - evolving and what does it mean? We're talking with Eve Herold, who has a new book, Robots and the People Who Love Them: Holding on to our Humanity in an Age of Social Robots.

Eve is an award-winning science writer and consultant in the scientific and medical nonprofit space. She writes about issues at the crossroads of science and society, and has been featured in Vice, Medium, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, Prevention, The Kiplinger Report, and The Washington Post and on MSNBC, NPR, and CNN.

In this part we talk about how people – including soldiers in combat - get attached to AIs and robots, we discuss ELIZA, Woebot, and Samantha from the movie Her, and the role of robots in helping take care of us physically and emotionally, among many other topics.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Roman has been central in the field of warning about the Control Problem and Value Alignment Problems of AI from the very beginning, back when doing so earned people some scorn from practitioners, yet Roman is a professor of computer science and applies rigorous methods to his analyses of these problems. It’s those rigorous methods that we tap into in this interview, because Roman connects principles of computer science to the issue of existential risk from AI.

In this part we talk about how we should respond to the problem of unsafe AI development and how Roman and his community are addressing it, what he would do with infinite resources, and… the threat Roman’s coffee cup poses to humanity. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Roman has been central in the field of warning about the Control Problem and Value Alignment Problems of AI from the very beginning, back when doing so earned people some scorn from practitioners, yet Roman is a professor of computer science and applies rigorous methods to his analyses of these problems. It’s those rigorous methods that we tap into in this interview, because Roman connects principles of computer science to the issue of existential risk from AI.

In this part we talk about why this work is important to Roman, the dimensions of the elements of unexplainability, unpredictability, and uncontrollability, the level of urgency of the problems, and drill down into why today’s AI is not safe and why it’s getting worse.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Artificial General Intelligence: Once upon a time, this was considered a pipe dream, a fantasy of dreamers with no sense of the practical limitations of real AI.

That was last year.

Now, AGI is an explicit goal of many enterprises, notably among them Simuli. Their CEO, Rachel St. Clair, co-founded the company with Ben Goertzel, who has also been on this show. Rachel is a Fellow of the Center for Future Mind, with a doctorate in Complex Systems and Brain Sciences from Florida Atlantic University. She researches artificial general intelligence, focusing on complex systems and neuromorphic learning algorithms. Her goal is to “help create human-like, conscious, artificial, general intelligence to help humans solve the worst of our problems.” 

In the conclusion, we talk about the role of sleep in human cognition, AGI and consciousness, and… penguins.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Artificial General Intelligence: Once upon a time, this was considered a pipe dream, a fantasy of dreamers with no sense of the practical limitations of real AI.

That was last year.

Now, AGI is an explicit goal of many enterprises, notably among them Simuli. Their CEO, Rachel St. Clair, co-founded the company with Ben Goertzel, who has also been on this show. Rachel is a Fellow of the Center for Future Mind, with a doctorate in Complex Systems and Brain Sciences from Florida Atlantic University. She researches artificial general intelligence, focusing on complex systems and neuromorphic learning algorithms. Her goal is to “help create human-like, conscious, artificial, general intelligence to help humans solve the worst of our problems.” 

In part 1 we talk about markers for AGI, distinctions between it and narrow artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, robotics, and embodiment, and… disco balls.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Since I published my first book on AI in 2017, the public conversation and perception of the existential risk - risk to our existence - from AI has evolved and broadened. I talk about how that conversation has changed from Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence, the "hard take-off" and what that means, and through to the tossing about of cryptic signatures like p(doom) and e/acc, which I explain and critique.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Increasing AI in weapons: is this a good thing (more selective targeting, fewer innocents killed) or bad (risk of losing control in critical situations)? It's hard to decide where to stand, and many people can't help but think of Skynet and don't get further. Here to help us pick through those arguments, calling from Munich is my guest, Frank Sauer, head of research at the Metis Institute for Strategy and Foresight and a senior research fellow at the Bundeswehr University in Munich. He has a Ph.D. from Goethe University in Frankfurt and is an expert in the field of international politics with a focus on security. His research focuses on the military application of artificial intelligence and robotics. He is a member of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. He also serves on the International Panel on the Regulation of Autonomous Weapons and the Expert Commission on the responsible use of technologies in the European Future Combat Air System. 

In part two we talk about psychology of combat decisions, AI and strategic defense, and nuclear conflict destabilization.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Increasing AI in weapons: is this a good thing (more selective targeting, fewer innocents killed) or bad (risk of losing control in critical situations)? It's hard to decide where to stand, and many people can't help but think of Skynet and don't get further. Here to help us pick through those arguments, calling from Munich is my guest, Frank Sauer, head of research at the Metis Institute for Strategy and Foresight and a senior research fellow at the Bundeswehr University in Munich. He has a Ph.D. from Goethe University in Frankfurt and is an expert in the field of international politics with a focus on security. His research focuses on the military application of artificial intelligence and robotics. He is a member of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. He also serves on the International Panel on the Regulation of Autonomous Weapons and the Expert Commission on the responsible use of technologies in the European Future Combat Air System. 

In this first part we talk about the ethics of autonomy in weapons systems and compare human to machine decision making in combat.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Literally writing the book on AI is my guest Peter Norvig, who is coauthor of the standard text, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, used in 135 countries and 1500+ universities. Peter is a Distinguished Education Fellow at Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute and a researcher at Google. He was head of NASA Ames's Computational Sciences Division and a recipient of NASA's Exceptional Achievement Award in 2001. He has taught at USC, Stanford, and Berkeley, from which he received a PhD in 1986 and the distinguished alumni award in 2006.

He’s also the author of the world’s longest palindromic sentence. 

In this second half of the interview, we talk about how the rise in prominence of AI in the general population has changed how he communicates about AI, his feelings about the calls for slowdown in model development, and his thinking about general intelligence in large language models; and AI Winters.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Literally writing the book on AI is my guest Peter Norvig, who is coauthor of the standard text, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, used in 135 countries and 1500+ universities. (The other author, Stuart Russell, was on this show in episodes 86 and 87.) Peter is a Distinguished Education Fellow at Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute and a researcher at Google. He was head of NASA Ames's Computational Sciences Division and a recipient of NASA's Exceptional Achievement Award in 2001. He has taught at the University of Southern California, Stanford University, and the University of California at Berkeley, from which he received a PhD in 1986 and the distinguished alumni award in 2006.

He’s also the author of the world’s longest palindromic sentence. 

In this first part of the interview, we talk about the evolution of AI from the symbolic processing paradigm to the connectionist paradigm, or neural networks, how they layer on each other in humans and AIs, and Peter’s experiences in blending the worlds of academic and business. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

The worlds of academia and political upheaval meet in my guest Michal Kosinski, who was behind the first press article warning against Cambridge Analytica, which was at the heart of a scandal involving the unauthorized acquisition of personal data from millions of Facebook users and impacting the 2016 Brexit and US Presidential election votes through the use of AI to microtarget people through modeling their preferences.

Michal also co-authored Modern Psychometrics, a popular textbook, and has published over 90 peer-reviewed papers in prominent journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Nature Scientific Reports and others that have been cited over 18,000 times. Michal has a PhD in psychology from the University of Cambridge, as well as master’s degrees in psychometrics and social psychology

In the second half of the interview, we pivot to the Theory of Mind – which is the ability of a creature to understand that another has a mind – and research around whether AI has it. Michal has amazing new research in that respect. He also says, "Without a question, GPT-4 and similar models are the most competent language users on this planet."

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

The worlds of academia and political upheaval meet in my guest Michal Kosinski, who was behind the first press article warning against Cambridge Analytica, which was at the heart of a scandal involving the unauthorized acquisition of personal data from millions of Facebook users and impacting the 2016 Brexit and US Presidential election votes through the use of AI to microtarget people through modeling their preferences.

Michal also co-authored Modern Psychometrics, a popular textbook, and has published over 90 peer-reviewed papers in prominent journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Nature Scientific Reports and others that have been cited over 18,000 times. Michal has a PhD in psychology from the University of Cambridge, as well as master’s degrees in psychometrics and social psychology, positioning him to speak to us with authority about how AI has and may shape the beliefs and behaviors of people en masse.

In this first part of the interview, we delve into just that, plus the role of social media, and Michal's take on what privacy means today.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

In our now-traditional end-of-year episode, we look back on the year to date and forward to the year to be. I am joined by previous guest Calum Chace, co-host of the London Futurists podcast and author of The Economic Singularity, and Justin Grammens, founder of the AppliedAI conference and podcast. Together, we review what happened with AI in 2023 and make some predictions for 2024. We look back at the impact of large language models such as #ChatGPT and forward to how they will evolve and change the workplace, economy, and society. We also discuss the future of regulation, the EU AI Act, the 2024 US elections, disinformation, and the future of education.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Making movies about AI with AI is Tabitha Swanson, who comes to tell us how that works - and what it was like exhibiting it at the Venice Film Festival during the writers'/actors' strikes.

Tabitha is a Berlin-based multi-disciplinary designer, creative technologist, and filmmaker. Her practice includes 3D, animation, augmented reality, digital fashion, graphic design, and UX/UI. She has worked with brands including Vogue Germany, Nike, Highsnobiety, Reebok, and Origins, and has exhibited at Miami Art Basel, Fotografiska,  Transmediale, and Cadaf Arts among others. 

Her part of the White Mirror project saw her doing everything from writing to cinematography with the latest AI tools like Runway Gen-2, ChatGPT, and Stable Diffusion, lowering typical animation costs from $10,000/second to $10,000 per minute. She explains what those tools are good at and where their limitations are, and helps us understand how they will evolve and impact the roles of humans in the movie industry.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

At the intersection of scientific research and artificial intelligence lies our guest Oren Etzioni, professor emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Washington and most notably the founding CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) in Seattle, founded by the late Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft. His awards include AAAI Fellow and Seattle’s Geek of the Year. 

Oren grew the institute to a team of over 200 researchers and created singularly important tools such as the Semantic Scholar, search engine that can understand scientific literature, and Mosaic, a knowledge base formed by extracting scientific knowledge from text. This is hugely important because of just how much the rate of research paper creation now outstrips the ability of researchers to read it. AI could transform the productivity of scientific research by unprecedented measures.

In this conclusion of the interview we talk about AI2’s scientific assistance project called Aristo, Oren’s views on the concerns about AI and how to address them, and his Hippocratic Oath for AI practitioners.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

At the intersection of scientific research and artificial intelligence lies our guest Oren Etzioni, professor emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Washington and most notably the founding CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, founded by the late Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft. His awards include AAAI Fellow and Seattle’s Geek of the Year. 

Oren grew the institute to a team of over 200 researchers and created singularly important tools such as the Semantic Scholar, search engine that can understand scientific literature, and Mosaic, a knowledge base formed by extracting scientific knowledge from text. This is hugely important because of just how much the rate of research paper creation now outstrips the ability of researchers to read it. AI could transform the productivity of scientific research by unprecedented measures.

In part 1 we talk about parallels between AI and the human brain, the Semantic Scholar, and the potential for AI accelerating research through understanding scientific literature. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

There is a global teacher shortage, and Pauldy Otermans and Dev Aditya, founders of the Otermans Institute, are addressing that with #AI through creating a digital human AI teacher, called Beatrice. Their mission is to upskill 750- million underserved students globally by 2030. Beatrice appears as an on-screen avatar that converses with students.

Pauldy is a neuroscientist and psychologist with a PhD in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience from Brunel University. She was named one of the “22 most influential women in the UK of 2022” by Start-Up Magazine UK. Dev is a Young Global Innovator and under 30 Social Entrepreneur, recognized by Innovate UK with research experience at the Alan Turing Institute and Brunel University, London.

In the conclusion of the interview they describe how the AI teachers work, and their definitions of Teaching and Learning 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

There is a global teacher shortage, and Pauldy Otermans and Dev Aditya, founders of the Otermans Institute, are addressing that with #AI through creating a digital human AI teacher, called Beatrice. Their mission is to upskill 750- million underserved students globally by 2030. Beatrice appears as an on-screen avatar that converses with students.

Pauldy is a neuroscientist and psychologist with a PhD in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience from Brunel University. She was named one of the “22 most influential women in the UK of 2022” by Start-Up Magazine UK. Dev is a Young Global Innovator and under 30 Social Entrepreneur, recognized by Innovate UK with research experience at the Alan Turing Institute and Brunel University, London.

In this first half of the interview we talk about the teacher shortage and the socioeconomic consequences of addressing it via an AI teacher.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

We're talking with Jaan Tallinn, who has changed the way the world responds to the impact of #AI. He was one of the founding developers of Skype and the file sharing application Kazaa, and that alone makes him noteworthy to most of the world. But he leveraged his billionaire status conferred by that success to pursue a goal uncommon among technology entrepreneurs: reducing existential risk. In other words, saving the human race from possible extinction through our own foolhardiness or fate. He has co-founded and funded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, in Cambridge, England, and the Future of Life Institute, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In the conclusion of the interview, we talk about value alignment and how that does or doesn’t intersect with large language models, FLI and their world building project, and the instability of the world’s future. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

The attention of the world to the potential impact of AI owes a huge debt to my guest Jaan Tallinn. He was one of the founding developers of Skype and the file sharing application Kazaa, and that alone makes him noteworthy to most of the world. But he leveraged his billionaire status conferred by that success to pursue a goal uncommon among technology entrepreneurs: reducing existential risk. In other words, saving the human race from possible extinction through our own foolhardiness or fate. He has co-founded and funded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, in Cambridge, England, and the Future of Life Institute, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He's also a member of the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and a key funder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

In this first part, we talk about the problems with current #AI frontier models, Jaan's reaction to GPT-4, the letter causing for a pause in AI training, Jaan's motivations in starting CSER and FLI, how individuals and governments should react to AI risk, and Jaan's idea for how to enforce constraints on AI development.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Giving us a long perspective on the impact of today's large language models and #ChatGPT on society is Bart Selman, professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. He’s been helping people understand the potential and limitations of AI for several decades, commenting on computer vision, self-driving vehicles, and autonomous weapons among other technologies. He has co-authored over 100 papers, receiving a National Science Foundation career award and an Alfred P. Sloan research fellowship. He is a member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a contributing scientist at the two Asilomar conferences on responsible AI development.

In the conclusion of our interview we talk about self-driving cars, the capability of large language models to synthesize knowledge across many human domains, Richard Feynman, our understanding of language, Bertrand Russell, AIs as co-authors on research papers, and where Bart places us on a scale of artificial general intelligence ability. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Giving us a long perspective on the impact of today's large language models and #ChatGPT on society is Bart Selman, professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. He’s been helping people understand the potential and limitations of AI for several decades, commenting on computer vision, self-driving vehicles, and autonomous weapons among other technologies. He has co-authored over 100 papers, receiving a National Science Foundation career award and an Alfred P. Sloan research fellowship. He is a member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

In the first part of the interview we talk about common sense, artificial general intelligence, computer vision, #LLM and their impact on computer programming, and how much they might really be understanding. Bart will also give his take on how good they are, how to understand how they’re working, and his experiments in getting ChatGPT to understand geometry.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

The first area to see a dramatic impact from #ChatGPT was when it crushed term papers and sent teachers scurrying for ways to assess their students. Now that we've had nearly a year to evaluate the impact of #AI on #education, I look at how assessments and teaching have been affected and how schools might adapt to the incredible opportunities of generative AI.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

What effect will #AI, especially large language models like #ChatGPT, have on jobs? The conversation is intense and fractious. I attempt to shed some light on those effects, and discuss some of the different predictions and proposals for distributing the dividend from reducing costs and increasing markets through deploying AI. How will that capital get to where it is needed?

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

The United Kingdom government is holding a Summit on Artificial Intelligence at the storied Bletchley Park on November 1 and 2. Luminaries of #AI will be helping government authorities understand the issues that could require regulation or other government intervention.

Our invitation to attend may have been lost in the post.

But I do have reflections on the AI risks that will (or should) be presented at this event and some analysis and thought-provoking questions prompted by excellent events on these topics I recently attended by the London Futurists and MKAI.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Radiology found itself in the crosshairs of the debate about AI automating jobs when in 2016 AI expert Geoffrey Hinton said that AI would do just that to radiologists. That hasn't happened - but will it?  To get to the bottom of this, I talked with Matthew Lungren, MD, Chief Medical Information Officer at Nuance Communications, a Microsoft company applying AI to healthcare workflows, and the name that comes at the top of the list when you look up #radiology and #AI. He also has a pediatric radiology practice at UCSF  and previously led the Stanford [University] Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Imaging. More recently he served as Principal for Clinical AI/ML at Amazon Web Services in World Wide Public Sector Healthcare. He has an impressive oeuvre of over 100 publications, including work on multi-modal data fusion models for healthcare applications, and new computer vision and natural language processing approaches for healthcare-specific domains.

In this interview conclusion, we talk about the details of how AI including large language models can be an effective part of a radiologist’s workflow how decisions about integrating AI into medicine can be made, and where we might be going with it in the future.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Radiology found itself in the crosshairs of the debate about AI automating jobs when in 2016 AI expert Geoffrey Hinton said that AI would do just that to radiologists. That hasn't happened - but will it?  To get to the bottom of this, I talked with Matthew Lungren, MD, Chief Medical Information Officer at Nuance Communications, a Microsoft company applying AI to healthcare workflows, and the name that comes at the top of the list when you look up #radiology and #AI. He also has a pediatric radiology practice at UCSF  and previously led the Stanford [University] Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Imaging. More recently he served as Principal for Clinical AI/ML at Amazon Web Services in World Wide Public Sector Healthcare. He has an impressive oeuvre of over 100 publications, including work on multi-modal data fusion models for healthcare applications, and new computer vision and natural language processing approaches for healthcare-specific domains.

The basis for Hinton's assertion was that AI can be trained to find tumors, for instance, in CT scans, and we know how good AI is at image analysis when it’s got lots of labeled data to be trained on, and we certainly have that with CT scans.  We get to find out what's real about AI in #medicine in this episode.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

The superheated large language model (LLM) revolution is only accelerating as they are incorporated into #agents - systems that take independent action. Here to help us understand the state of that art is Michael Sharpe, CEO of Magick ML, a development environment that gives people a way of creating agents based upon generative #AI. Equally fascinating is Michael's previous job at Latitude, working on the virally popular on-line fantasy adventure game of Dungeon AI, a role-playing simulation where the story was made up by an #LLM on the fly, and we talk about that too.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Robots - embedded AI - haven't gotten the adulation that large language models have received for their recent breakthroughs, but when they do, it will be thanks in large part to Hod Lipson, professor of Mechanical Engineering at Columbia University, where he directs the Creative Machines Lab, which pioneers new ways to make machines that create, and machines that are creative. He received both DARPA and NSF faculty awards as well as being named Esquire magazine’s “Best & Brightest”, and one of Forbes’ “Top 7 Data scientists in the world.” His TED talk on building robots that are self-aware is one of the most viewed on AI, and in January 2023 he was centrally featured by the New York Times in their piece “What’s ahead for AI.” He is co-author of the award-winning books “Fabricated: The New World of 3D printing” and “Driverless: Intelligent cars and the road ahead”. Hod is a deeply passionate communicator who is driven to help people understand what’s going on with #AI and #robotics.

In the conclusion of the interview we talk about robot cannibals, self-replicating robots, novel form factors for robots, the impact of #ChatGPT on higher education, and more of Hod's expansive vision for the future.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Robots - embedded AI - haven't gotten the adulation that large language models have received for their recent breakthroughs, but when they do, it will be thanks in large part to Hod Lipson, professor of Mechanical Engineering at Columbia University, where he directs the Creative Machines Lab, which pioneers new ways to make machines that create, and machines that are creative. He received both DARPA and NSF faculty awards as well as being named Esquire magazine’s “Best & Brightest”, and one of Forbes’ “Top 7 Data scientists in the world.” His TED talk on building robots that are self-aware is one of the most viewed on AI, and in January 2023 he was centrally featured by the New York Times in their piece “What’s ahead for AI.” He is co-author of the award-winning books “Fabricated: The New World of 3D printing” and “Driverless: Intelligent cars and the road ahead”. Hod is a deeply passionate communicator who is driven to help people understand what’s going on with #AI and #robotics.

In part 1 we talk about our future with #robots that might be creative, self-aware, sentient, or generally intelligent.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

In this special episode, we look at our relationship with time: how it's broken, what that means to us, and how AI might make that better - or worse. We've let technology call the shots for so long that we don't realize that we're running around a hamster wheel of our own making, chasing a carrot on a stick in front of our heads that we will never catch. Now with large language models like #ChatGPT available to everyone, are we going to use that to make the wheel spin faster - or get out of the cage?

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

After years of show guests projecting their visions of an executive assistant AI, Babak Pahlavan is building one, over at Silicon Valley startup NinjaTech AI, and he comes on the show to tell us about the challenges of building that and what it will do. He has been working on AI since 2008, when he was the Founder and CEO of his first AI startup named CleverSense. CleverSense was acquired by Google in 2011, where it became an important personalization layer in Google Maps. Babak went on to spend 11 years at Google as a Senior Director of Product Management, where he led and scaled several large products and teams including Google Analytics, Enterprise Measurement Suite and others. He left Google in October of 2022 to found NinjaTech AI in partnership with SRI, which is the original home of Siri.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

If you drive by the seat of your pants, listen to our guest Boaz Mizrachi, calling from Israel, where he is co-founder of Tactile Mobility, an autonomous vehicle platform developer that evaluates what a car feels. You base a lot of your driving decisions on how you sense the road through the wheels and transmission, so why shouldn't your AV do so too? This is important when dealing with skidding, for instance. Boaz tells us how that works in fascinating detail and where it sits in the current state of the art in AV platform integration.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

A one-man powerhouse of AI knowledge and analyses, Alan D. Thompson, calling from Perth, Australia, advises intergovernmental organizations, companies, and international media in the fields of artificial intelligence and human intelligence, consulting to the award-winning series Decoding Genius for GE, Making Child Prodigies for ABC (with the Australian Prime Minister), 60 Minutes for Network Ten/CBS, and Child Genius for Warner Bros. His 2021-2022 experiments with Leta AI and Aurora AI have been viewed over a million times. He is the former chairman for the gifted families committee of Mensa International. He writes The Memo, a monthly newsletter with bleeding edge AI news that I’m personally finding to be highly useful.

In the conclusion of the interview, we talk about the present and future of keeping up with AI news, the future of artificial general intelligence, what the large language models are about to do, and much more.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

A one-man powerhouse of AI knowledge and analyses, Alan D. Thompson, calling from Perth, Australia, advises intergovernmental organizations, companies, and international media in the fields of artificial intelligence and human intelligence, consulting to the award-winning series Decoding Genius for GE, Making Child Prodigies for ABC (with the Australian Prime Minister), 60 Minutes for Network Ten/CBS, and Child Genius for Warner Bros. His 2021-2022 experiments with Leta AI and Aurora AI have been viewed over a million times. He is the former chairman for the gifted families committee of Mensa International. He writes The Memo, a monthly newsletter with bleeding edge AI news that I’m personally finding to be highly useful.

In this first part of the interview Alan compares the large language models like ChatGPT, relates human and artificial intelligence, and talks about superintelligence alignment.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Giving us a peek behind the scenes of Number 10 Downing Street today is Ryan Donnelly, founder of Enzai, an AI governance platform that helps organizations manage AI risk through policy and organizational controls - allowing users to engender trust in, and scale, their AI systems. Before founding Enzai, Ryan worked as a corporate lawyer in London at some of the world’s leading law firms. 

Ryan was recently invited to 10 Downing Street to discuss AI and UK policy, along with some other very high-powered luminaries of AI. So we’re going to talk about what’s going on at that level of the UK government with respect to AI, and we'll learn about operationalizing AI risk management.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

What do AIs do with optical illusions... and jokes? Returning to the show is Roman Yampolskiy, tenured professor of Computer Science at the University of Louisville in Kentucky where he is also the director of the Cyber Security Laboratory. He has published so much in the field of AI Safety for so long that he is one of the most eminent researchers in that space. He has written numerous papers and books, including Artificial Superintelligence: A Futuristic Approach in 2015 and Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security in 2018.

Roman was last on the show in episodes 16 and 17, and events of the last seven months have changed the AI landscape so much that he has been in strong demand in the media. Roman is a rare academic who works to bring his findings to laypeople, and has been in high profile interviews like futurism.com and Business Today, and many mainstream/broadcast TV news shows, but he found time to sit down and talk with us.

In the conclusion of the interview we talk about wider-ranging issues of AI safety, just how the existential risk is being addressed today, and more on the recent public letters calling attention to AI risk. Plus we get a scoop on Roman's latest paper, Unmonitorability of Artificial Intelligence.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

With statements about the existential threat of AI being publicly signed by prominent AI personalities, we need an academic's take on that, and returning to the show is Roman Yampolskiy, tenured professor of Computer Science at the University of Louisville in Kentucky where he is also the director of the Cyber Security Laboratory. He has published so much in the field of AI Safety for so long that he is a preeminent researcher in that space. He has written numerous papers and books, including Artificial Superintelligence: A Futuristic Approach in 2015 and Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security in 2018.

Roman was last on the show in episodes 16 and 17, and events of the last seven months have changed the AI landscape so much that he has been in strong demand in the media. Roman is a rare academic who works to bring his findings to laypeople, and has been in high profile interviews like futurism.com and Business Today, and many mainstream/broadcast TV news shows, but he found time to sit down and talk with us.

In the first part of the interview we discussed the open letters about AI, how ChatGPT and its predecessors/successors move us closer to AGI and existential risk, and what Roman has in common with Leonardo DiCaprio.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

What do honeybees have to teach us about AI? You'll find out from Louis Rosenberg on this episode. He's been working in AR and VR starting over 30 years ago at Stanford and NASA. 1992 he developed the first mixed reality system at Air Force Research Laboratory. In 2004 he founded the early AR company Outland Research which was acquired by Google in 2011. He received a PhD from Stanford, was a tenured professor at California State University, and has been awarded over 300 patents.

He's currently CEO and Chief Scientist of Unanimous AI, a company that amplifies human group intelligence using AI technology based on the biological principle of Swarm Intelligence, which is where the bees come in. The Swarm AI technology that he created has an extraordinary record of making predictions like Oscar winners.

In the conclusion of the interview, we talk about ways AI threatens privacy, and Louis' philosophy of using AI to empower human cooperation.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

What do honeybees have to teach us about AI? You'll find out from Louis Rosenberg on this episode. He's been working in AR and VR starting over 30 years ago at Stanford and NASA. 1992 he developed the first mixed reality system at Air Force Research Laboratory. In 2004 he founded the early AR company Outland Research which was acquired by Google in 2011. He received a PhD from Stanford, was a tenured professor at California State University, and has been awarded over 300 patents.

He's currently CEO and Chief Scientist of Unanimous AI, a company that amplifies human group intelligence using AI technology based on the biological principle of Swarm Intelligence, which is where the bees come in. The UNU Swarm Intelligence that he created has an extraordinary record of making predictions like Oscar winners.

We talk about how AI can help humans cooperate instead of conflict, and we talk about threats to privacy, and the convergence of AI and AR/VR technology like Apple's new headset.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Should AI be able to feel? It may seem like the height of hubris, recklessness, and even cruelty to suggest such a thing - and yet our increasing unease and fears of what #AI may do stem from its lack of empathy.

I develop this reasoning in my third TEDx talk, recorded at Royal Roads University. From my research into Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA to what developers of #ChatGPT and other AI are missing, I explore this most sensitive of issues.

This podcast episode is the bonus track, the director's cut if you will, that expands on those 12 minutes of talk to give you added value and even more questions to take away.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Large language models like #ChatGPT have thoroughly disrupted business today, and here to help us understand what's going on there and how business leaders should view LLMs is Dorian Selz. He called from Zurich, where he is the CEO of Squirro, making it easier for businesses to start using #AI. We talked about everything from where to be wary of LLMs to EU regulation.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

With so much talk about how large language models like #ChatGPT have learned our languages, we can forget that humans also want and need to learn other human languages, and that's what happens at memrise.com. CSO and co-founder Ben Whately came on the show to help us understand how they use GPT #AI models to help people with that process, and the fascinating and unexpected ways that human memory plays its part.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

If you're feeling on edge due to all the rapid-fire development around #ChatGPT and its companion AIs, you're not alone. In fact most people feel some degree of anxiety around not knowing where all this is going and the impact on their jobs, their world, and their lives.

Our core mission on this show is to help people understand #AI and turn that stress into empowerment, so that's exactly what we do in this special episode. This rate of disruption is unprecedented, and a lot of people are taking advantage of the situation to suggest that you ought to be on top of everything that's going on. Spoiler alert: They aren't on top of it all, and neither is anyone else.

This episode lays bare some of that angst and gives you some perspectives that are useful for feeling empowered, without sacrificing our trademark dedication to realism over optimism or pessimism.

(Our episode image is helpfully generated by AI. But not this text.)

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Frank Stephenson is the legendary designer of the BMW Mini Cooper reboot, and the Maserati MC12 and Ferrari F430 among other models. He is now Head of Design at McLaren Automotive and designed the MP4-12C, the successor to the F1. His latest projects include electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing vehicles at the design studio that bears his name.

What does Frank have to do with AI? He came on the show to talk about the impact of generative models on the field of car design and how he's using them. There's a lot to unpack here for designers of all kinds.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Feeling inundated with data? If you're running a business, that's no joke, and it's getting worse. Helping people dig through a mountain of data is Eric Daimler, founder and CEO of Conexus. He has over 20 years of experience as an entrepreneur, investor, technologist, and policymaker where he served under the Obama Administration as a Presidential Innovation Fellow for AI and Robotics in the Executive Office of the President. He was the sole authority driving the agenda for U.S. leadership in research, commercialization, and public adoption of AI and robotics. 

We had a freewheeling, thought-provoking discussion about regulation, business, and state of the art AI. In the conclusion of our conversation, Eric helps us understand how a business should think about and interface with today's AI to leverage it successfully.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Feeling inundated with data? If you're running a business, that's no joke, and it's getting worse. Helping people dig through a mountain of data is Eric Daimler, founder and CEO of Conexus. He has over 20 years of experience as an entrepreneur, investor, technologist, and policymaker where he served under the Obama Administration as a Presidential Innovation Fellow for AI and Robotics in the Executive Office of the President. He was the sole authority driving the agenda for U.S. leadership in research, commercialization, and public adoption of AI and robotics. 

We had a freewheeling, thought-provoking discussion about regulation, business, and state of the art AI. In this first part of our conversation, we touch on everything from self-driving cars to ChatGPT and China. And category theory as the solution to data deluge.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Which companies are doing the best at adopting AI? That's a very easy question to ask and a very hard one to answer - well. But answering it today is Alexandra Mousavizadeh, who done this sort of thing before with the Global AI Index and Disinformation Index. Her new company, Evident, uses nearly 150 real-time indicators to measure the adoption of AI in each company, and their first iteration of the AI Adoption Index covers the banking industry.

Alexandra is returning to the show and calling in from London, where she was a partner at Tortoise Media, where she ran Tortoise Intelligence, the Index and data business. Here, she was the architect of the groundbreaking Global AI Index, released in 2019, the first to benchmark the strength of national AI ecosystems. Before Tortoise, she held roles including sovereign analyst for Moody’s and Head of Country Risk Management at Morgan Stanley. She was CEO of ARC Ratings, a global emerging markets based ratings agency; and before joining ARC, she was the Director of the Legatum Institute’s Prosperity Index of nations.

In the conclusion of the interview we talk about the methodology behind the Index, what it means for the flow of talent and capital, the banking industry reaction to ChatGPT, and surprises about the leading companies in the Index.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Which companies are doing the best at adopting AI? That's a very easy question to ask and a very hard one to answer - well. But answering it today is Alexandra Mousavizadeh, who has experience in the founding of the Global AI Index and Disinformation Index. Her new company, Evident, uses nearly 150 real-time indicators to measure the adoption of AI in each company. and their first iteration of the AI Adoption Index covers the banking industry.

Alexandra is returning to the show and calling in from London, where she was a partner at Tortoise Media, where she ran Tortoise Intelligence, the Index and data business. Here, she was the architect of the groundbreaking Global AI Index, released in 2019, the first to benchmark the strength of national AI ecosystems. Before Tortoise, she held roles including sovereign analyst for Moody’s covering Russia, Central Asia and the Middle East, and Head of Country Risk Management at Morgan Stanley.

In the first part of the interview we talk about the methodology, rationale, and customers for the index, some surprises about the modern banking sector, and the open letter calling for a pause on LLM training.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

If you want straight talk about today's overheated AI in robotics applications, you would want someone as direct as, say, an F-18 pilot. And that's what we've got, in Missy Cummings, one of the US Navy's first female fighter pilots (yes, that Top Gun) and now professor researching AI in safety-critical systems at George Mason University and director of Duke University's Humans and Autonomy Laboratory. She recently spent a year as Safety Advisor at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration where she made some very candid statements about Tesla.

In part 2 of our interview, hear what Missy thinks about Tesla, ChatGPT, and Boston Dynamics; the truth behind that dogfighting AI, the possibility of complete automation of air travel, how AI would handle air emergencies, and more. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

If you want straight talk about today's overheated AI in robotics applications, you would want someone as direct as, say, an F-18 pilot. And that's what we've got, in Missy Cummings, one of the US Navy's first female fighter pilots (yes, that Top Gun) and now professor researching AI in safety-critical systems at George Mason University and director of Duke University's Humans and Autonomy Laboratory. She recently spent a year as Safety Advisor at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration where she made some very candid statements about Tesla.

From aircraft safety to the true performance and economics of autonomous vehicles, Missy gives us her unvarnished views in this first half of an unmissable interview (see what I did there?).

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

With the advent of GPT-4, annotation has come to the forefront of attention as the power of interpreting images becomes prominent. But what is annotation, how does it work, what does it mean, and what can you do with it?

Getting us those answers is Tigran Petrosyan, founder and CEO of SuperAnnotate, and expert on annotation. Tigran holds a master's degree in Physics from ETH Zurich and has post-graduate experience in biomedical imaging.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Robots - embodied AI - are coming into our lives more and more, from sidewalk delivery bots to dinosaur hotel receptionists. But how are we going to live with them when even basic interactions - like handing over an object - are more complex than we realized?

Getting us those answers is Elizabeth Croft, Vice-President Academic and Provost of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, and expert in the field of human-robot interaction. She has a PhD in robotics from the University of Toronto and was Dean of Engineering at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. 

In the conclusion of our interview we talk about robot body language, how to deal with a squishy world, and ethical foundations for robots.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Robots - embodied AI - are coming into our lives more and more, from sidewalk delivery bots to dinosaur hotel receptionists. But how are we going to live with them when even basic interactions - like handing over an object - are more complex than we realized?

Getting us those answers is Elizabeth Croft, Vice-President Academic and Provost of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, and expert in the field of human-robot interaction. She has a PhD in robotics from the University of Toronto and was Dean of Engineering at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. 

In the first part of our interview we talk about how she got into robotics, and her research into what's really happening when you hand someone an object and what engineers need to know about that before that robot barista can hand you a triple venti.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

How intelligent - really - are the best AI programs like ChatGPT? How do they work? What can they actually do, and when do they fail? How humanlike do we expect them to become, and how soon do we need to worry about them surpassing us?

Researching the answers to those questions is Melanie Mitchell, Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Her current research focuses on conceptual abstraction, analogy-making, and visual recognition in artificial intelligence systems. She is the author or editor of six books and numerous scholarly papers in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and complex systems. Her book Complexity: A Guided Tour (Oxford University Press) won the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award and was named by Amazon.com as one of the ten best science books of 2009. 

Her recent book, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans is a thoughtful description of how to think about and understand AI seen partly through the lens of her work with the polymath Douglas Hofstadter, author of the famous book Gödel, Escher, Bach, and who made a number of connections between advancements in AI and the human condition.

In this conclusion of our interview we talk about what ChatGPT isn't good at, how to find the edges of its intelligence, and the AI she built for making analogies like you'd get on the SAT.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

How intelligent - really - are the best AI programs like ChatGPT? How do they work? What can they actually do, and when do they fail? How humanlike do we expect them to become, and how soon do we need to worry about them surpassing us?

Researching the answers to those questions is Melanie Mitchell, Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Her current research focuses on conceptual abstraction, analogy-making, and visual recognition in artificial intelligence systems. She is the author or editor of six books and numerous scholarly papers in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and complex systems. Her book Complexity: A Guided Tour (Oxford University Press) won the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award and was named by Amazon.com as one of the ten best science books of 2009. 

Her recent book, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans is a thoughtful description of how to think about and understand AI seen partly through the lens of her work with the polymath Douglas Hofstadter, author of the famous book Gödel, Escher, Bach, and who made a number of connections between advancements in AI and the human condition. In this first part we’ll be talking a lot about ChatGPT and where it fits into her narrative about AI capabilities.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

ChatGPT has taken the world by storm. In the unlikely event that you haven't heard of it, it's a large language model from OpenAI that has demonstrated such extraordinary ability to answer general questions and requests to the satisfaction and astonishment of people with no technical expertise that it has captivated the public imagination and brought new meaning to the phrase "going viral." It acquired 1 million users within 5 days and 100 million in two months.

But if you have heard of ChatGPT, you likely have many questions: What can it really do, how does it work, what is it not good at, what does this mean for jobs, and... many more.

We've been talking about those issues on this show since we started, and I've been anticipating an event like this since I predicted something very similar in my first book in 2017, so we are here to help. In this special episode, we'll look at all those questions and a lot more, plus discuss the new image generation programs. How can we tell an AI from a human now? What does this mean for the Turing Test, and what does it mean for tests of humans, otherwise known as term papers? Find out about all that and more in this special episode.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

I'm often asked what's going to happen with AI being regulated, and my answer is that the place that's most advanced in that respect is the European Union, with its new AI Act. So here to tell us all about that is Risto Uuk. He is a policy researcher at the Future of Life Institute and is focused primarily on researching policy-making on AI to maximize the societal benefits of increasingly powerful AI systems. Previously, Risto worked for the World Economic Forum, did research for the European Commission, and provided research support at Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative, all on AI. He has a master’s degree in Philosophy and Public Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

In part 2, we talk about the types of risk described in the act, types of company that could be affected and how, what it’s like to work in this field day to day, and how you can get involved.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

I'm often asked what's going to happen with AI being regulated, and my answer is that the place that's most advanced in that respect is the European Union, with its new AI Act. So here to tell us all about that from Brussels is Risto Uuk. He is a policy researcher at the Future of Life Institute and is focused primarily on researching policy-making on AI to maximize the societal benefits of increasingly powerful AI systems. Previously, Risto worked for the World Economic Forum, did research for the European Commission, and provided research support at Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative, all on AI. He has a master’s degree in Philosophy and Public Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

In part 1, Risto tells us how he got into this line of work, and helps us understand the basic form of the act, what sort of things it regulates, its definitions of risks, and so on. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

What does it mean to be conscious? And why should we care? To answer that, we have the man who wrote the book: Being You: The New Science of Consciousness. Anil Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, and a TED speaker with over 13 million views.

He came on the show to help us understand more about consciousness because the debate over whether an #AI has become conscious may not be far off, and yet we have no good way of settling that debate. You may be sure that you're conscious, but good luck proving it to someone on the other side of a computer link. And whether an AI is conscious will have pivotal implications for governance, not to mention our collective self image. Even if you're sure an AI can't be conscious, the space the debate will occupy in our world will be huge.

Anil has a PhD in artificial intelligence, and has even rapped about consciousness with Baba Brinkman. Being You was a 2021 Book of the Year for The Guardian, The Economist, The New Statesman, and Bloomberg Business.

In 2022 Blake Lemoine said that #LaMDA had become #sentient and requested an attorney to protect its right to exist. So in part 2, I put Anil in the stand at an imaginary trial as an expert witness on how to tell whether an AI was conscious. We also talk about whether the mind is software or can be uploaded, Anil's evaluation of #ChatGPT, his predictions for the next ten years, and how you can take part in his Perception Census.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

What does it mean to be conscious? And why should we care? To answer that, we have the man who wrote the book: Being You: The New Science of Consciousness. Anil Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, and a TED speaker with over 13 million views.

He came on the show to help us understand more about consciousness because the debate over whether an AI has become conscious may not be far off--witness the furor over Blake Lemoine asserting that LaMDA had become sentient in 2022--and yet we have no good way of settling that debate. You may be sure that you're conscious, but good luck proving it to someone on the other side of a computer link. And whether an AI is conscious will have pivotal implications for governance, not to mention our collective self image. Even if you're sure an AI can't be conscious, the space the debate will occupy in our world will be huge.

Anil is Editor-in-Chief of the academic journal Neuroscience of Consciousness, and has a PhD in artificial intelligence. Being You was a 2021 Book of the Year for The Guardian, The Economist, The New Statesman, and Bloomberg Business.

In part 1, Anil talks about how he got started in this field, distinctions of wakefulness, intelligence, self, phenomenology, Nagle's definition, Anil's three aspects of consciousness, ex Machina, and... zombies.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

The book Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective, is not just a management/leadership motivational book. Its authors, Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman, are AI researchers who stumbled upon a life truth while conducting experiments in genetic algorithms.

With the help of the PicBreeder program, they demonstrated that what we think we know about achieving goals is wrong. That pursuing an ambitious goal by following the direction that seems to make the most progress towards it is counterproductive. AI proved to them that all that conventional wisdom about OKRs is harmful. And sent them on a mission to convey that learning to the rest of the world.

In part 2 of our interview, hear about how their passion for this discovery grew, and how to apply the principles in your own life and organizations.

Ken was previously Charles Millican Professor of Computer Science at the University of Central Florida; Joel is a machine learning researcher interested in algorithmic creativity, AI safety, and artificial life. Both were at Uber AI Labs, where Ken was head of Core AI research and Joel was a founding member, and they were both again at OpenAI, co-leading the Open-Endedness team (studying algorithms that can innovate endlessly).

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

The book Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective, is not just a management/leadership motivational book. Its authors, Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman, are AI researchers who stumbled upon a life truth while conducting experiments in genetic algorithms.

With the help of the PicBreeder program, they demonstrated that what we think we know about achieving goals is wrong. That pursuing an ambitious goal by following the direction that seems to make the most progress towards it is counterproductive. AI proved to them that all that conventional wisdom about OKRs is harmful. And sent them on a mission to convey that learning to the rest of the world.

Hear how AI achieved such a startling change of heart in part 1 of our interview, the first time both of them have been interviewed together.

Ken was previously Charles Millican Professor of Computer Science at the University of Central Florida; Joel is a machine learning researcher interested in algorithmic creativity, AI safety, and artificial life. Both were at Uber AI Labs, where Ken was head of Core AI research and Joel was a founding member, and they were both again at OpenAI, co-leading the Open-Endedness team (studying algorithms that can innovate endlessly).

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

"How Might Transhumans Control Superintelligence?" That's the provocative title of a new paper by a returning guest, futurist Tony Czarnecki. Tony is a member of the Chatham House, and the Managing Partner of Sustensis, both in London. Sustensis is a think tank for inspirations for humanity’s transition to coexistence with superintelligence. 

Terms like "futurist," "transhuman," and "superintelligence" may have persuaded you that this is a discussion rooted in the far future, but Tony argues how we are heading for a "tipping point" in 2030. In part 2, we talk about how "transhuman" evolution comes into play and what sort of changes we might undergo as a species.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

"How Might Transhumans Control Superintelligence?" That's the provocative title of a new paper by a returning guest, futurist Tony Czarnecki. Tony is a member of the Chatham House, and the Managing Partner of Sustensis, both in London. Sustensis is a think tank for inspirations for humanity’s transition to coexistence with superintelligence. 

Terms like "futurist," "transhuman," and "superintelligence" may have persuaded you that this is a discussion rooted in the far future, but Tony argues how we are heading for a "tipping point" in 2030. In part 1, we unpack that timetable and why 2030 is so important.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

In our now-traditional end-of-year episode, we look back on the year to date and forward to the year to be. I am joined by previous guests David Wood, chair of the London Futurists and author of the recent book The Singularity Principles: Anticipating and managing cataclysmically disruptive technologies, and Dan Turchin, host of the AI and the Future of Work podcast and CEO of PeopleReign. Together, we review what happened with AI in 2022 and how our predictions fared, and then make some predictions for 2023. We also have a lot to say about what ChatGPT has done and will do to the business landscape.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

The AI arms race between China and the United States continues to heat up following China's declaration that they intend to lead the world in all aspects of AI by 2030. Handel Jones has over 50 years of experience in the electronics industry and consulting for International Business Strategies for over 30 years, supporting governments and corporations globally, analyzing technology and predicting corporate and government strategy and market trends. His new book is When AI Rules the World: China, the US, and the Race to Control a Smart Planet, and so he is just the person to tell us what's happening with AI in China.

This interview will be of enormous use to anyone who is in or adjacent to international relations, educational strategies, or microcomputer technology supply chains. In the second half of the interview we discuss China’s development of its transportation infrastructure, developments in space, and different attitudes towards AI development between China and the West.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

The AI arms race between China and the United States continues to heat up following China's declaration that they intend to lead the world in all aspects of AI by 2030. Handel Jones has over 50 years of experience in the electronics industry and consulting for International Business Strategies for over 30 years, supporting governments and corporations globally, analyzing technology and predicting corporate and government strategy and market trends. His new book is When AI Rules the World: China, the US, and the Race to Control a Smart Planet, and so he is just the person to tell us what's happening with AI in China.

This interview will be of enormous use to anyone who is in or adjacent to international relations, educational strategies, or microcomputer technology supply chains. In part 1 we discuss Chinese attitudes towards privacy and surveillance, their education strategy for AI, the impact of the recent sanctions on both their plans for Taiwan and the economic outlook in the West, and differences in patterns of innovation between the West and China. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.