Artificial Intelligence and You

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.