Artificial Intelligence and You

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.

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.