Artificial Intelligence and You

If you want an expert on how today's AI compares to the human brain, it would be hard to beat an Oxford neuroscientist who also works at DeepMind. That describes Chris Summerfield, who runs Oxford University’s Human Information Processing lab in the Department of Experimental Psychology and author of the upcoming book, "Natural General Intelligence." We have a fascinating discussion about how AI - today's transformers in particular - are like or not like human intelligence.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder... and also in AI, when it's used by Chanuki Seresinhe to evaluate the aesthetic appeal of outdoor scenery. Amazing as it sounds, her PhD research trained AI to evaluate the beauty of Great Britain at a one-kilometer resolution, and she's only just getting started. I talk with Chanuki, now head of Data Science at Zoopla, about how she did that and what the applications and ramifications of her work are.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

James Wilson is a former Leadership Partner at Gartner and now occupies a similar role at Capgemini, helping customers with the ethical issues of AI. He has a new book, Artificial Negligence, just released, looking at the broad issues and challenges of AI. We talk about the dimensions of AI ethics that concern customers, like sustainability, and his work with the Finnish government on their Aurora AI literacy program.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Justin Harrison is an entrepreneur, founder, and CEO of YOV, Inc. (You, Only Virtual)—a company specializing in posthumous digital communications. In 2019, he found himself staring down death on two fronts: his own, from a near fatal motorcycle accident, as well as his mother’s stage-4 cancer diagnosis. He was terrified of losing his mother and wanted something that could preserve the essence of their relationship. So he embarked on a process of recreating his mother's persona in an AI chatbot. We explore how that works and what it's like for him.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

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 the ethical issues of search engines and recommender algorithms, and get  another take on the Blake Lemoine incident from an ethical viewpoint.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

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.