Artificial Intelligence and You

Increasing AI in weapons: is this a good thing (more selective targeting, fewer innocents killed) or bad (risk of losing control in critical situations)? It's hard to decide where to stand, and many people can't help but think of Skynet and don't get further. Here to help us pick through those arguments, calling from Munich is my guest, Frank Sauer, head of research at the Metis Institute for Strategy and Foresight and a senior research fellow at the Bundeswehr University in Munich. He has a Ph.D. from Goethe University in Frankfurt and is an expert in the field of international politics with a focus on security. His research focuses on the military application of artificial intelligence and robotics. He is a member of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. He also serves on the International Panel on the Regulation of Autonomous Weapons and the Expert Commission on the responsible use of technologies in the European Future Combat Air System. 

In part two we talk about psychology of combat decisions, AI and strategic defense, and nuclear conflict destabilization.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Increasing AI in weapons: is this a good thing (more selective targeting, fewer innocents killed) or bad (risk of losing control in critical situations)? It's hard to decide where to stand, and many people can't help but think of Skynet and don't get further. Here to help us pick through those arguments, calling from Munich is my guest, Frank Sauer, head of research at the Metis Institute for Strategy and Foresight and a senior research fellow at the Bundeswehr University in Munich. He has a Ph.D. from Goethe University in Frankfurt and is an expert in the field of international politics with a focus on security. His research focuses on the military application of artificial intelligence and robotics. He is a member of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. He also serves on the International Panel on the Regulation of Autonomous Weapons and the Expert Commission on the responsible use of technologies in the European Future Combat Air System. 

In this first part we talk about the ethics of autonomy in weapons systems and compare human to machine decision making in combat.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Literally writing the book on AI is my guest Peter Norvig, who is coauthor of the standard text, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, used in 135 countries and 1500+ universities. Peter is a Distinguished Education Fellow at Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute and a researcher at Google. He was head of NASA Ames's Computational Sciences Division and a recipient of NASA's Exceptional Achievement Award in 2001. He has taught at USC, Stanford, and Berkeley, from which he received a PhD in 1986 and the distinguished alumni award in 2006.

He’s also the author of the world’s longest palindromic sentence. 

In this second half of the interview, we talk about how the rise in prominence of AI in the general population has changed how he communicates about AI, his feelings about the calls for slowdown in model development, and his thinking about general intelligence in large language models; and AI Winters.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Literally writing the book on AI is my guest Peter Norvig, who is coauthor of the standard text, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, used in 135 countries and 1500+ universities. (The other author, Stuart Russell, was on this show in episodes 86 and 87.) Peter is a Distinguished Education Fellow at Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute and a researcher at Google. He was head of NASA Ames's Computational Sciences Division and a recipient of NASA's Exceptional Achievement Award in 2001. He has taught at the University of Southern California, Stanford University, and the University of California at Berkeley, from which he received a PhD in 1986 and the distinguished alumni award in 2006.

He’s also the author of the world’s longest palindromic sentence. 

In this first part of the interview, we talk about the evolution of AI from the symbolic processing paradigm to the connectionist paradigm, or neural networks, how they layer on each other in humans and AIs, and Peter’s experiences in blending the worlds of academic and business. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

The worlds of academia and political upheaval meet in my guest Michal Kosinski, who was behind the first press article warning against Cambridge Analytica, which was at the heart of a scandal involving the unauthorized acquisition of personal data from millions of Facebook users and impacting the 2016 Brexit and US Presidential election votes through the use of AI to microtarget people through modeling their preferences.

Michal also co-authored Modern Psychometrics, a popular textbook, and has published over 90 peer-reviewed papers in prominent journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Nature Scientific Reports and others that have been cited over 18,000 times. Michal has a PhD in psychology from the University of Cambridge, as well as master’s degrees in psychometrics and social psychology

In the second half of the interview, we pivot to the Theory of Mind – which is the ability of a creature to understand that another has a mind – and research around whether AI has it. Michal has amazing new research in that respect. He also says, "Without a question, GPT-4 and similar models are the most competent language users on this planet."

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

The worlds of academia and political upheaval meet in my guest Michal Kosinski, who was behind the first press article warning against Cambridge Analytica, which was at the heart of a scandal involving the unauthorized acquisition of personal data from millions of Facebook users and impacting the 2016 Brexit and US Presidential election votes through the use of AI to microtarget people through modeling their preferences.

Michal also co-authored Modern Psychometrics, a popular textbook, and has published over 90 peer-reviewed papers in prominent journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Nature Scientific Reports and others that have been cited over 18,000 times. Michal has a PhD in psychology from the University of Cambridge, as well as master’s degrees in psychometrics and social psychology, positioning him to speak to us with authority about how AI has and may shape the beliefs and behaviors of people en masse.

In this first part of the interview, we delve into just that, plus the role of social media, and Michal's take on what privacy means today.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

In our now-traditional end-of-year episode, we look back on the year to date and forward to the year to be. I am joined by previous guest Calum Chace, co-host of the London Futurists podcast and author of The Economic Singularity, and Justin Grammens, founder of the AppliedAI conference and podcast. Together, we review what happened with AI in 2023 and make some predictions for 2024. We look back at the impact of large language models such as #ChatGPT and forward to how they will evolve and change the workplace, economy, and society. We also discuss the future of regulation, the EU AI Act, the 2024 US elections, disinformation, and the future of education.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Making movies about AI with AI is Tabitha Swanson, who comes to tell us how that works - and what it was like exhibiting it at the Venice Film Festival during the writers'/actors' strikes.

Tabitha is a Berlin-based multi-disciplinary designer, creative technologist, and filmmaker. Her practice includes 3D, animation, augmented reality, digital fashion, graphic design, and UX/UI. She has worked with brands including Vogue Germany, Nike, Highsnobiety, Reebok, and Origins, and has exhibited at Miami Art Basel, Fotografiska,  Transmediale, and Cadaf Arts among others. 

Her part of the White Mirror project saw her doing everything from writing to cinematography with the latest AI tools like Runway Gen-2, ChatGPT, and Stable Diffusion, lowering typical animation costs from $10,000/second to $10,000 per minute. She explains what those tools are good at and where their limitations are, and helps us understand how they will evolve and impact the roles of humans in the movie industry.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.