Artificial Intelligence and You

Cansu Canca is founder and director of the AI Ethics Lab, providing ethics analysis and guidance to researchers and practitioners. Prior to that, she was on the full-time faculty at the University of Hong Kong, and an ethics researcher at Harvard. She was listed among the “30 Influential Women Advancing AI in Boston” and the “100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics,” and has given the TEDx talk How to Solve AI’s Ethical Puzzles. We talk about her journey coming from the field of medical ethics into AI ethics, and what the experience of a company working with the AI Ethics Lab is like.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Nobody expects... an AI podcast to veer into comedy parody. Possibly with good reason. In a show almost completely free of spam and Queen Victoria, we interpret some of today's news and themes about AI through the lens of Monty Python sketches.

If you don't know what Monty Python is, this will confuse you more than a cat and make your brain hurt. If you've seen some of today's news about AI and know the airspeed of an unladen swallow, you're in the right place.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

What is consciousness, how might it emerge from or into AI, and how can it be transferred? Fascinating questions tackled by the oeuvre of a fascinating author, Robert J. Sawyer, the "Dean of Canadian Science Fiction," and one of only eight writers ever to win all three of the science-fiction field’s top honors for best novel of the year: the Hugo Award, which he won for his novel Hominids; the Nebula Award, which he won for his novel The Terminal Experiment, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, which he won with his novel Mindscan.

In the second half of our interview, we talk about the simulation hypothesis, consciousness capture and transfer, and what today’s AI technologists should be learning from science fiction. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

What if there are zombies among us? In another dive into the nature of consciousness, the "philosophical zombie" is a fascinating topic explored by a fascinating author, Robert J. Sawyer, the "Dean of Canadian Science Fiction," and one of only eight writers ever to win all three of the science-fiction field’s top honors for best novel of the year: the Hugo Award, which he won for his novel Hominids; the Nebula Award, which he won for his novel The Terminal Experiment, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, which he won with his novel Mindscan.

We talk about zombies because of the question of how to know whether an AI is conscious, and yes, we discuss Blake Lemoine's assertion that Google's LaMDA AI has become sentient. Rob's stories explore how humans and superintelligent AI can both win. Find out more in part 1.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

We've talked a lot about artificial general intelligence (AGI) on the show, but never as much as in this interview, when we talk with Mr. AGI himself, Ben Goertzel. Ben wrote a book, Artificial General Intelligence, founded the AGI Society and SingularityNET, and wrote Ten Years to the Singularity if We Really, Really, Try. He was Chief Scientist of Hanson Robotics and was one of the first people to popularize the term AGI.

In the second half of the interview, we talk about the Google engineer who declared the LAMDA AI to be sentient, how and when to declare an AI sentient or AGI, a "digital baby brain," and the SingularityNET metaverse as a training ground for AGIs. We cover an incredible amount of ground!

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

We've talked a lot about artificial general intelligence (AGI) on the show, but never as much as in this interview, when we talk with Mr. AGI himself, Ben Goertzel. Ben wrote a book, Artificial General Intelligence, founded the AGI Society and SingularityNET, and wrote Ten Years to the Singularity if We Really, Really, Try. He was Chief Scientist of Hanson Robotics and was one of the first people to popularize the term AGI.

In part 1, we talk about how he got into AGI, his new AGI hardware platform, human-AGI distinctions, and what it would be like for a robot to go to MIT. Really, this episode is packed!

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Are you good at bluffing? Do you think you could beat a computer? What if I told you that it was mathematically proven that the computer would beat you? That's what Michael Bowling did for his program that plays heads-up, limit Texas Hold'Em: he proved that it was impossible to do better than draw against it.

Michael is a professor at the University of Alberta, a research scientist at DeepMind, and has been on Scientific American Frontiers, National Geographic Today, and featured in exhibits at the Smithsonian.

This is an interview from an unreleased archive interview from 2016, recorded at the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association annual conference. I was pretty green at this then, but Michael's answers are illuminating and just as useful today despite advancements in computer poker since then. He also talked about work being done on video games, and the conversation about artificial general intelligence that was just starting to become intense around the AI community then.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

For our second anniversary show, we're going to explain some of the terms that are often used on the show and not always spelled out, like ANI (artificial narrow intelligence), AGI (artificial general intelligence), and ASI (artificial super intelligence). What do they mean, why do so many people talk about them, what do you need to know to follow along?

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.