Artificial Intelligence and You

Part 2 of our interview with Stuart Russell, OBE, professor of AI at UC Berkeley, author of both the standard textbook on AI and the 2019 book Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control. You may know him as the BBC's 2021 Reith Lecturer on artificial intelligence. Stuart is a prominent voice in the public debate about AI risk and the spokesperson for the viral video Slaughterbots commentary on lethal autonomous weapons.  This week we talk about what it means for an AI to understand something – or not; reasoning chains; and exciting new research into artificial general intelligence. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Stuart Russell, professor of AI at UC Berkeley, author of both the standard textbook on AI and the 2019 book Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control is my guest this week. You may know him as the BBC's 2021 Reith Lecturer on artificial intelligence. Queen Elizabeth knows him as a 2021 recipient of the Order of the British Empire. Stuart is a prominent voice in the public side of the AI risk conversation.

So much to talk about! In part 1 we get into the autonomous lethal weapon debate; you may have seen Stuart in his role as activist and spokesperson for the viral video Slaughterbots.  We also talk about the public narrative on AI risk and help you make sense of the apparently contradictory positions there.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

See AI and the future of humanity through the eyes of an extraordinary thinker, science fiction author and scientist David Brin. Author of bestsellers such as Earth, Existence, Foundation's Triumph, and the Uplift series, David also has a PhD in astronomy and consults to organizations ranging from the CIA to Google.

What he does for them is get them to open their minds to new possibilities, and that's what he does for us, talking this week about how to restructure government to avoid AI seizing control in the future, how to fix accountability on the Internet, and... The Lion King. He also has a special message for superintelligent AIs listening now or in the future.

He provided links for some of the things we talked about, which are also in the transcript:

• Foundation’s Triumph, Existence, Kiln People, Vivid Tomorrows
• Essay on Central Control over AI
• Micropayments instead of advertising: Here and here.
• A fascinating discussion of the issue with a trio of brilliant law professors
• The War on Folks Who Know Stuff

It's a smörgåsbord for the mind in this conclusion of our interview.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

See AI and the future of humanity through the eyes of an extraordinary thinker: Science fiction author and scientist David Brin is here to expand our minds with his creative and thought-provoking insights. Author of bestsellers such as The Postman, Earth, Existence, and the Uplift series, David also has a PhD in astronomy and consults to organizations ranging from the CIA to Google.

What he does for them is get them to open their minds to new possibilities, and that's what he does for us, talking about the role of science fiction, where the real danger from AI will emerge from and why, how superintelligence was treated in Foundation's Triumph, his sequel to Asimov's series, and the systems of power that control our future today. Yes, it's a lot to take in!

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

AI continues to penetrate more and more into our daily lives, including activities that are in the background for most of us - like construction. Have you ever looked at a construction site and thought, "Surely there's a way there could be more people working on this at once?" Well, René Morkos, founder and CEO of Alice Technologies, did just that, and then wrote a PhD thesis on using AI to solve that problem. Learn with me how AI is changing construction.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Never mind fantasies about Skynet and Terminators; how to trust AI is a real issue right now, as AI is used in life-impacting decisions like medical diagnoses and loan granting. Kush Varshney has a PhD from MIT and is a distinguished researcher at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York, where he leads the machine learning group in the Foundations of Trustworthy AI department. He is the author of the book Trustworthy Machine Learning. We talk about the whole ecosystem of trustworthiness, finding out where it goes in areas like privacy, anonymization, regulation, compliance, and oversight.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Joining us from Dubai is Tannya Jajal, keynote speaker, AI futurist, and UAE Chapter Lead for the Global Women in Tech Movement. She is a resource manager at VMware, a technology contributor at Forbes Middle East, and author of the new book, Thinking Machines: AI and the Intelligence Explosion.

I invited Tannya to the podcast after running into her on two different AI panels in different countries on the same day (virtually!). We talk about how AI is being taught and developed in the worlds of women, children, and the Middle East.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

On our last show of 2021, it's time to think about the year ahead, and for that I have a panel of amazing experts!

• Richard Foster-Fletcher, founder of MKAI, the inclusive Artificial Intelligence Community, advisor to the United Nations Environmental Programme and UN Framework Convention on Climate Change;
• Ben Goertzel, chief scientist of Hanson Robotics and author of Ten Years To the Singularity If We Really Really Try;
• Katie King, speaker and marketing consultant, and author of the 2022 book AI Strategy for Sales and Marketing: Connecting Marketing, Sales and Customer Experience ;
• Prashant Natarajan, VP of Strategy & Products at H2O.ai and author of Demystifying AI for the Enterprise.

It's a free-ranging, free-spirited, free-for-all as we talk about the past and future trajectory of COVID effects on technology adoption, the evolution of attitudes towards, and equality in, AI, changes in the environmental impact of AI, and more. This is high quality thinking from people at the coal face of the industry, giving you their best shots at information you can use for the year ahead. Happy New Year!

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.