Artificial Intelligence and You

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.