Episodes

Monday Dec 23, 2024
236 - Guest: Alexandra Belias, Head of Public Policy, DeepMind
Monday Dec 23, 2024
Monday Dec 23, 2024
This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .
Here to give us insights into some of the really cool stuff Google DeepMind is doing is Alexandra Belias, Head of product policy & partnerships. She serves as a bridge between DeepMind’s product policy organization and the policy community. She previously led their international public policy work. She has an MPA in Economic Policy from LSE and is currently a tech fellow at the Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights. We talk about Google DeepMind's science policy, the emerging network of national AI safety institutes, the tension between regulation and innovation, AlphaFold and its successors, AlphaMissense and AlphaProteo, their SynthID watermarking detection tool, reducing contrail pollution through AI, and safety frameworks for frontier AI. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.
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Monday Dec 16, 2024
235 - Guest: Dwayne Wood, Professor of Education, part 2
Monday Dec 16, 2024
Monday Dec 16, 2024
This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .
It's tough enough being a teacher in the AI age, so can you imagine what it's like training the teachers themselves? That's what Dwayne Wood, Associate Professor at National University of San Diego does. He is the Academic Program Director for the Educational Technology Master’s program there, so he’s front and center of the question of how teachers deal with AI in the classroom and has been working on addressing the current shortage of teachers. We talk about the possible impact of AI on essential learning skills, the difference between technical and tactical competence, the in-person educational experience, and how Dwayne sees things changing in the next year. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.
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Monday Dec 09, 2024
234 - Guest: Dwayne Wood, Professor of Education, part 1
Monday Dec 09, 2024
Monday Dec 09, 2024
This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .
It's tough enough being a teacher in the AI age, so can you imagine what it's like training the teachers themselves? That's what Dwayne Wood, Associate Professor at National University of San Diego does. He is the Academic Program Director for the Educational Technology Master’s program there, so he’s front and center of the question of how teachers deal with AI in the classroom and has been working on addressing the current shortage of teachers. We talk about the relationships between teachers and students, the shifting base of fundamental skills in an AI world, the skills needed by instructional designers, how to teach effective and safe use of generative AI, and how to place the guardrails around learners using it. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.
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Monday Dec 02, 2024
233 - Guest: J. Craig Wheeler, Astrophysics Professor
Monday Dec 02, 2024
Monday Dec 02, 2024
This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .
We are going big on the show this time, with astrophysicist J. Craig Wheeler, Samuel T. and Fern Yanagisawa Regents Professor of Astronomy, Emeritus, at the University of Texas at Austin, and author of the book The Path to Singularity: How Technology will Challenge the Future of Humanity, released on November 19. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and Legacy Fellow of the American Astronomical Society, has published nearly 400 scientific papers, authored both professional and popular books on supernovae, and served on advisory committees for NSF, NASA, and the National Research Council. His new book, spanning the range of technologies that are propelling us towards singularity from robots to space colonization, has a foreword by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who says, “The world is long overdue for a peek at the state of society and what its future looks like through the lens of a scientist. And when that scientist is also an astrophysicist, you can guarantee the perspectives shared will be as deep and as vast as the universe itself.” We talk about the evolution of homo sapiens, high reliability organizations, brain computer interfaces, and transhumanism among other topics. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.
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Monday Nov 25, 2024
232 - Special Panel: Educators on AI, part 2
Monday Nov 25, 2024
Monday Nov 25, 2024
This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .
We're extending the conversation about AI in education to the front lines in this episode, with four very experienced and credentialed educators discussing their experiences and insights into AI in schools.
In the conclusion, we talk about whether students need to read as much as they used to now they have AI, fact checking, some disturbing stories about the use of AI detectors in schools, where the panel sees these trends evolving to, what they’re doing to help students learn better in an AI world, and… Iron Man. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.
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Monday Nov 18, 2024
231 - Special Panel: Educators on AI, part 1
Monday Nov 18, 2024
Monday Nov 18, 2024
This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .
We're extending the conversation about AI in education to the front lines in this episode, with four very experienced and credentialed educators discussing their experiences and insights into AI in schools.
We talk about how much kids were using GenAI without our knowing, how to turn GenAI in schools from a threat to an opportunity, the issue of cheating with ChatGPT, the discrepancy between how many workers are using AI and how many teachers are using it, how rules get made, confirmation bias and AI, using tools versus gaining competencies, and whether teachers will quit. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.
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Monday Nov 11, 2024
230 - Guest: Caroline Bassett, Digital Humanities Professor, part 2
Monday Nov 11, 2024
Monday Nov 11, 2024
This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .
Digital Humanities sounds at first blush like a contradiction of terms: the intersection of our digital, technology-centric culture, and the humanities, like arts, literature, and philosophy. Aren't those like oil and water? But my guest illustrates just how important this discipline is by illuminating both of those fields from viewpoints I found fascinating and very different from what we normally encounter. Professor Caroline Bassett is the first Director of Cambridge Digital Humanities, an interdisciplinary research center in Cambridge University. She is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College and researches digital technologies and cultural change with a focus on AI. She co-founded the Sussex Humanities Lab and at Cambridge she inaugurated the Masters of Philosophy in Digital Humanities and last month launched the new doctoral programme in Digital Humanities. In the conclusion, we talk about how technology shapes our psychology, how it enables mass movements, science fiction, the role of big Silicon Valley companies, and much more. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.
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Monday Nov 04, 2024
229 - Guest: Caroline Bassett, Digital Humanities Professor, part 1
Monday Nov 04, 2024
Monday Nov 04, 2024
This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .
Digital Humanities sounds at first blush like a contradiction of terms: the intersection of our digital, technology-centric culture, and the humanities, like arts, literature, and philosophy. Aren't those like oil and water? But my guest illustrates just how important this discipline is by illuminating both of those fields from viewpoints I found fascinating and very different from what we normally encounter. Professor Caroline Bassett is the first Director of Cambridge Digital Humanities, an interdisciplinary research center in Cambridge University. She is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College and researches digital technologies and cultural change with a focus on AI. She co-founded the Sussex Humanities Lab and at Cambridge she inaugurated the Masters of Philosophy in Digital Humanities and last month launched the new doctoral programme in Digital Humanities. In part 1 we talk about what digital humanities is, how it intersects with AI, what science and the humanities have to learn from each other, Joseph Weizenbaum and the reactions to his ELIZA chatbot, Luddites, and how passively or otherwise we accept new technology. Caroline really made me see in particular how what she calls "technocratic rationality," a way of thinking borne out of a technological culture accelerated by AI, reduces the novelty which we can experience in the world in a way we should certainly preserve. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.
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