Artificial Intelligence and You

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.

How does AI see the world? it's easy to take for granted that an AI that is trained on labeled data to recognize certain images very well is seeing them the same way we do, but that's not so. The AI is quite alien, and helping us to see the world through its eyes is Tom White, a New Zealand-based artist. He creates physical artworks that highlight how machines “see” and thus how they think, suggesting that these systems are capable of abstraction and conceptual thinking. He has exhibited computer-based artwork internationally over the past 25 years with themes of artificial intelligence, interactivity, and computational creativity. He is currently a lecturer and researcher at University of Wellington School of Design where he teaches students the creative potential of computer programming and artificial intelligence.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

When serious engineering with safety of life is at stake - think rockets, engine turbines, aircraft - Richard Ahlfeld brings artificial intelligence to the job. He modeled the Space Launch System as part of his PhD at Imperial College London and now is CEO of Monolith AI, commercializing AI in the role of engineering design and testing. We talk about just how that gets done and what sort of difference it makes over traditional methods.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Bryant Cruse, former naval aviator (we'll talk about that) and Space Telescope mission operations team member (we'll talk about that too), is the founder and CEO of New Sapience, working on bold new advances in artificial general intelligence. We talk about what real understanding by AI means. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.