109. Intelligence explosion with James Barrat

This time we're chatting with David Gerard about crypto bros, bubble economics and recessions, AI services pricing, who is making all the money, surveillance uses of AI, uses for empty datacenters, the RAM racket, AI as the platform for life, the cult of AI and effective altruism, AI doomers, anthropomorphising AI and more...

This episode we're chatting with Simon Bell about the future of the internet, science fiction, GenAI as research assistant, enshitification, stories of AI fear, emergence, writing the monster AI into being, meditation and more...

This time we're chatting with Lawrence Sheraton about models of economics, will AGI be ethical? moral capabilities of AI, an elusive obvious, how do we know what is right and wrong, “I feel, therefore I know Ethics”, the conditional / contextual nature of ethics, ethical truth, sycophantic and schizophrenic AI, ethical unlearning and more...

This time we're chatting with E.M. about the promise of AI and making human connection easier, speech recognition and supporting linguistic diversity, making useful technologies that have a purpose, Mozilla data collective, under represented cultures in datasets, accidental monocultures with technology, negative uses of datasets, AI literacy, the instability of LLMs and more...

This time we're chatting with Jonathan Strecker on the kinds of intelligences, why AI shouldn’t replace learning wholesale, six levels of wisdom, AI hallucinations and lack of trust, AI use in academia, skills atrophy, the anxious generation, dumbing down the masses, rethinking education and more...

This month we speak with Demetrios for the second time about: what is ML and MLops, narrow Machine Learning being still relevant, vibe coding, working with agents, talking to your computer, unknown productivity gains of LLMs, the chat interface as a bad interface for all knowledge, AIs that know when they’re wrong, the lack of ground truth, and more...

In this episode we chat with Rebecca for the second time about: intelligence isn’t everything, are LLM’s even safe? AI governance and guardrails, moral assurance, under-specification problems, lack of interdisciplinary work in robotics, AI shouldn’t be sold as a solution to everything, sidelining of AI Ethics, what are the actual benefits of AI? will AI progress widen inequality? and more...

This month we're chatting with Dietmar Fischer about what we will mean by saying "AI" in the future? AI in science fiction, the fact that AI’s don’t want for anything, jobs and the political effects of unemployment, post-work society and defining what a good life is, the Chinese AI legislation, protecting young people from AI anthropomorphising, AI literacy, the AI bubble, Human extinction, and more

This month we're chatting with Dr. Ewelina Kurtys on the uses of organoids and energy saving computing, the unknowns in neural science, differences between biological neurons and digital neural networks, how neurons operate and encoding information, the impractical nature of recreating brain structures, the tendency to anthropomorphise, determinism and more...

This episode James and I are trying to stay positive while chatting about: superintelligence, AI basic drives, and the alignment problem; The intelligence explosion, existential risks of AI; profit over responsibility, the super rich; AI regulation and much more