Artificial Intelligence and You

At the end of February there was a landmark conference in Panama City and online, the Beneficial AGI Summit. AGI of course standing for Artificial General Intelligence, the Holy Grail of AI. My guest is Jerome C. Glenn, one of the organizers and sponsors, and who has a long and storied history of pivotal leadership and contributions to addressing existential issues.

He is the co-founder and CEO of The Millennium Project on global futures research, was contracted by the European Commission to write the AGI paper for their Horizon 2025-2027 program, was the Washington, DC representative for the United Nations University as executive director of their American Council, and was instrumental in naming the first Space Shuttle the Enterprise, banning the first space weapon (the Fractional Orbital Bombardment System) in SALT II, and shared the 2022 Lifeboat Guardian Award with Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

He has over 50 years of futures research experience working for governments, international organizations, and private industry in Science & Technology Policy, Environmental Security, Economics, Education, Defense, Space, and much more. 

In this first half we talk about his recent work with groups of the United Nations General Assembly, and his decentralized approach to grassroots empowerment in both implementing AGI and working together to regulate it.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

How is our relationship with bots - robots and chatbots - evolving and what does it mean? We're talking with Eve Herold, who has a new book, Robots and the People Who Love Them: Holding on to our Humanity in an Age of Social Robots.

Eve is an award-winning science writer and consultant in the scientific and medical nonprofit space. She writes about issues at the crossroads of science and society, and has been featured in Vice, Medium, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, Prevention, The Kiplinger Report, and The Washington Post and on MSNBC, NPR, and CNN.

In this part we talk about how robots and AI can bring out the best and the worst in us, the responsibilities of roboticists, the difference between robots having emotions and our believing that they have emotions, and how this will evolve over the next decade or more.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

How is our relationship with bots - robots and chatbots - evolving and what does it mean? We're talking with Eve Herold, who has a new book, Robots and the People Who Love Them: Holding on to our Humanity in an Age of Social Robots.

Eve is an award-winning science writer and consultant in the scientific and medical nonprofit space. She writes about issues at the crossroads of science and society, and has been featured in Vice, Medium, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, Prevention, The Kiplinger Report, and The Washington Post and on MSNBC, NPR, and CNN.

In this part we talk about how people – including soldiers in combat - get attached to AIs and robots, we discuss ELIZA, Woebot, and Samantha from the movie Her, and the role of robots in helping take care of us physically and emotionally, among many other topics.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Roman has been central in the field of warning about the Control Problem and Value Alignment Problems of AI from the very beginning, back when doing so earned people some scorn from practitioners, yet Roman is a professor of computer science and applies rigorous methods to his analyses of these problems. It’s those rigorous methods that we tap into in this interview, because Roman connects principles of computer science to the issue of existential risk from AI.

In this part we talk about how we should respond to the problem of unsafe AI development and how Roman and his community are addressing it, what he would do with infinite resources, and… the threat Roman’s coffee cup poses to humanity. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Roman has been central in the field of warning about the Control Problem and Value Alignment Problems of AI from the very beginning, back when doing so earned people some scorn from practitioners, yet Roman is a professor of computer science and applies rigorous methods to his analyses of these problems. It’s those rigorous methods that we tap into in this interview, because Roman connects principles of computer science to the issue of existential risk from AI.

In this part we talk about why this work is important to Roman, the dimensions of the elements of unexplainability, unpredictability, and uncontrollability, the level of urgency of the problems, and drill down into why today’s AI is not safe and why it’s getting worse.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Artificial General Intelligence: Once upon a time, this was considered a pipe dream, a fantasy of dreamers with no sense of the practical limitations of real AI.

That was last year.

Now, AGI is an explicit goal of many enterprises, notably among them Simuli. Their CEO, Rachel St. Clair, co-founded the company with Ben Goertzel, who has also been on this show. Rachel is a Fellow of the Center for Future Mind, with a doctorate in Complex Systems and Brain Sciences from Florida Atlantic University. She researches artificial general intelligence, focusing on complex systems and neuromorphic learning algorithms. Her goal is to “help create human-like, conscious, artificial, general intelligence to help humans solve the worst of our problems.” 

In the conclusion, we talk about the role of sleep in human cognition, AGI and consciousness, and… penguins.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Artificial General Intelligence: Once upon a time, this was considered a pipe dream, a fantasy of dreamers with no sense of the practical limitations of real AI.

That was last year.

Now, AGI is an explicit goal of many enterprises, notably among them Simuli. Their CEO, Rachel St. Clair, co-founded the company with Ben Goertzel, who has also been on this show. Rachel is a Fellow of the Center for Future Mind, with a doctorate in Complex Systems and Brain Sciences from Florida Atlantic University. She researches artificial general intelligence, focusing on complex systems and neuromorphic learning algorithms. Her goal is to “help create human-like, conscious, artificial, general intelligence to help humans solve the worst of our problems.” 

In part 1 we talk about markers for AGI, distinctions between it and narrow artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, robotics, and embodiment, and… disco balls.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Since I published my first book on AI in 2017, the public conversation and perception of the existential risk - risk to our existence - from AI has evolved and broadened. I talk about how that conversation has changed from Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence, the "hard take-off" and what that means, and through to the tossing about of cryptic signatures like p(doom) and e/acc, which I explain and critique.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.