Artificial Intelligence and You

Olav Krigolson (@thatneurosciguy) has fried his brain - in the name of science. (It was not permanent.) He's a hands-on neuroscientist at the University of Victoria, where he runs the Krigolson Lab, studying brainwaves. He's helped astronauts prepare to go to Mars and can tell what someone's going to say before they say it. (Within limits.) We talk about those things and applicability to AI in part 1 of our interview.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Amit Gupta has an amazing life story and is only just getting started. After a close encounter with death, he changed jobs, took up writing science fiction, and wrote an AI to help him. That AI - Sudowrite - is an amazingly capable and creative application of GPT-3 that earned a feature in The New Yorker, and we dig into what it does and how it does it. Writing is about to be transformed.

Mention AI and You when applying for Sudowrite beta access and Amit will move you to the head of the line!

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Are you ready to interact with hyper-realistic digital avatars - computer-generated people - as part of your health care? They're not about to replace doctors and nurses, but they are ready to be an earlier part of the experience. Sathish Sankarpandi, data scientist at Orbital Global, tells us about the VirtTuri avatar (from "Virtual" and "Turing"). He'll tell us the capabilities and limits of today's AI-backed avatars.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

How will local and national authorities plan for self-driving vehicles in their jurisdictions? Todd Litman will help them. He is founder and executive director of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, an independent research organization dedicated to developing innovative solutions to transport problems. His report "Autonomous Vehicle Implementation Predictions" explores the impacts of autonomous vehicles, and their implications for transportation planning. In part 2, we talk about how AVs are likely to change transportation planning, and put some numbers around the projections. No zombie kangaroos this time, though.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

How will local and national authorities plan for self-driving vehicles in their jurisdictions? Todd Litman will help them. He is founder and executive director of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, an independent research organization dedicated to developing innovative solutions to transport problems. His report "Autonomous Vehicle Implementation Predictions" explores the impacts of autonomous vehicles, and their implications for transportation planning. In part 1 we talk about realistic expectations for AV implementation... plus zombie kangaroos.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Tomáš Mikolov is a PhD and research scientist at the Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics. He's done research for GoodAI and has worked at Google Brain and Facebook AI Research. He gave me some straight talk about the state of research and innovation in AI, and spelled out what it's missing and where researchers are playing it safe. We also talked about his research into "novelty search" and unpacked some ways to understand machine learning.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Kakia Chatsiou can tell you what a politician is really saying. Of course, most of us would say that the politician isn’t saying anything at all, but she’s more precise about it, and she uses AI to do it. She’s a professor at the University of Suffolk in the United Kingdom and this work shows up in her research paper Deep Learning for Political Science. She's an expert in natural language processing. We talk about how she analyzes the text of government COVID announcements to extract meaning, application to related fields such as ethics, and what it's like to be in this field.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Charles Radclyffe's company EthicsGrade grades companies on their AI ethics and governance and he has a lot to sat about what's ethical in AI companies, how to analyze it, what to do with that information, and how businesses can address their ethics.

Charles was formerly head of AI at Fidelity International and founded the podcast Are You a Robot?, which I will be on on August 30 (2021).

In part 2 we compare AI with other industries for their approaches to ethics, and discuss Charles' TEDx talk about the future of work: Three Steps to Surviving the Robot Revolution.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.