Artificial Intelligence and You

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.

At the intersection of scientific research and artificial intelligence lies our guest Oren Etzioni, professor emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Washington and most notably the founding CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) in Seattle, founded by the late Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft. His awards include AAAI Fellow and Seattle’s Geek of the Year. 

Oren grew the institute to a team of over 200 researchers and created singularly important tools such as the Semantic Scholar, search engine that can understand scientific literature, and Mosaic, a knowledge base formed by extracting scientific knowledge from text. This is hugely important because of just how much the rate of research paper creation now outstrips the ability of researchers to read it. AI could transform the productivity of scientific research by unprecedented measures.

In this conclusion of the interview we talk about AI2’s scientific assistance project called Aristo, Oren’s views on the concerns about AI and how to address them, and his Hippocratic Oath for AI practitioners.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

At the intersection of scientific research and artificial intelligence lies our guest Oren Etzioni, professor emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Washington and most notably the founding CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, founded by the late Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft. His awards include AAAI Fellow and Seattle’s Geek of the Year. 

Oren grew the institute to a team of over 200 researchers and created singularly important tools such as the Semantic Scholar, search engine that can understand scientific literature, and Mosaic, a knowledge base formed by extracting scientific knowledge from text. This is hugely important because of just how much the rate of research paper creation now outstrips the ability of researchers to read it. AI could transform the productivity of scientific research by unprecedented measures.

In part 1 we talk about parallels between AI and the human brain, the Semantic Scholar, and the potential for AI accelerating research through understanding scientific literature. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

There is a global teacher shortage, and Pauldy Otermans and Dev Aditya, founders of the Otermans Institute, are addressing that with #AI through creating a digital human AI teacher, called Beatrice. Their mission is to upskill 750- million underserved students globally by 2030. Beatrice appears as an on-screen avatar that converses with students.

Pauldy is a neuroscientist and psychologist with a PhD in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience from Brunel University. She was named one of the “22 most influential women in the UK of 2022” by Start-Up Magazine UK. Dev is a Young Global Innovator and under 30 Social Entrepreneur, recognized by Innovate UK with research experience at the Alan Turing Institute and Brunel University, London.

In the conclusion of the interview they describe how the AI teachers work, and their definitions of Teaching and Learning 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

There is a global teacher shortage, and Pauldy Otermans and Dev Aditya, founders of the Otermans Institute, are addressing that with #AI through creating a digital human AI teacher, called Beatrice. Their mission is to upskill 750- million underserved students globally by 2030. Beatrice appears as an on-screen avatar that converses with students.

Pauldy is a neuroscientist and psychologist with a PhD in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience from Brunel University. She was named one of the “22 most influential women in the UK of 2022” by Start-Up Magazine UK. Dev is a Young Global Innovator and under 30 Social Entrepreneur, recognized by Innovate UK with research experience at the Alan Turing Institute and Brunel University, London.

In this first half of the interview we talk about the teacher shortage and the socioeconomic consequences of addressing it via an AI teacher.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

We're talking with Jaan Tallinn, who has changed the way the world responds to the impact of #AI. He was one of the founding developers of Skype and the file sharing application Kazaa, and that alone makes him noteworthy to most of the world. But he leveraged his billionaire status conferred by that success to pursue a goal uncommon among technology entrepreneurs: reducing existential risk. In other words, saving the human race from possible extinction through our own foolhardiness or fate. He has co-founded and funded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, in Cambridge, England, and the Future of Life Institute, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In the conclusion of the interview, we talk about value alignment and how that does or doesn’t intersect with large language models, FLI and their world building project, and the instability of the world’s future. 

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.