Artificial Intelligence and You

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . Returning to the topic of AI in education, we’re going to look at postsecondary education this time with an expert and researcher in the field with a Canadian focus, Jessica Rizk, Senior Research Associate at Signal49 Research, where she leads research on education, skills development, workforce readiness, and the impact of artificial intelligence on learning and work. She has a PhD from McMaster University and collaborates with governments, post-secondary institutions, and industry partners across Canada to help inform policy and decision-making. We talk about how Jessica came to this work, the applicability of AI to the earlier years of K-12 classrooms, the chaotic response to AI in Canadian universities, the need for uniform frameworks, what’s happening in classrooms, students’ responses, how these issues land around the world, and lessons from COVID. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . I’ve been talking with award-winning documentary filmmaker James Barrat, author of last year’s book The Intelligence Explosion, who has been writing in this space since way back in 2013 with his book Our Final Invention. He’s worked with National Geographic, PBS, Discovery Channel, and leading broadcasters across Europe. I find the lens he sees the macro picture through to be usefully different to purely technical analyses. We conclude the interview by talking about about living with the unpredictability of AI, expert systems, friendly AI, self-improvement and emergence, what finding agency looks like if AI isn’t halted, how media like documentaries can help the public narrative, recursive self-improvement, what you personally can take charge of, and what to hold on to as everything changes. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . Back in 2013 my attention was taken by a book called Our Final Invention, which was one of the few books that I’ve added to my physical library, coming as it did a year before even Bostrom’s Superintelligence. The author, James Barrat, made one of the earlier cases for the potentially dire path AI would set us on; he got into this food fight long before it looked like a place to attract lots of eyeballs. Last year he published another book called The Intelligence Explosion, and it makes the case even more forcefully. Barrat comes to this from an interesting background as an award-winning documentary filmmaker working with National Geographic, PBS, Discovery Channel, and leading broadcasters across Europe. So we’re going to trace the evolution of the AI peril narrative from the time it was barely registering through to today’s white-hot frenzy. James brings a perspective that’s shaped by his background as a documentary filmmaker that I find very useful for how accessible it makes the macro concerns. It’s a good counterpoint to the often purely technical viewpoints we get here. We talk about regulation scenarios, Steve Omohundro’s rational agent theories, how our fiction shapes AI behavior, mechanistic interpretability, and accelerationism. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . I have been talking about how we reshape education to serve teens in an AI-transformed world with Rebecca Winthrop, co-author of the book The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better and leader of the Brookings Institution Global Task Force on AI in Education. Rebecca is a senior fellow and director of their Center for Universal Education, with a PhD in education from Columbia. She advises governments and other international institutions and has served as the chair of the U.N. Secretary General’s Global Education First Initiative’s Technical Advisory Group. In our conclusion, Rebecca tells us how she tested her book on her own kids, engagement archetypes in students, ways of increasing their engagement and the value of actual essays, comparing teaching systems and expectations between Asia and the West, the effects of social media and smartphones, and the prospects for entry-level jobs. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . I’ve talked many times in the past about AI being less like the introduction of a new technology and more like the introduction of an alien species to our planet. We’re going to talk about another alien species today: teenagers. I have teen and tween girls of my own, so this is personal. And to guide us through that is Rebecca Winthrop, co-author of the book The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better and leader of the Brookings Institution Global Task Force on AI in Education. She is a senior fellow and director of their Center for Universal Education, with a PhD in education from Columbia, and researching education globally, with special attention to the skills young people need to thrive in work, life, and as constructive citizens. She advises governments, international institutions, foundations, civil society organizations, and corporations on education issues and has served as the chair of the U.N. Secretary General’s Global Education First Initiative’s Technical Advisory Group. I may have used a frivolous line at the start there but the topic is anything but. Teenagers are on the front lines of humanity’s engaging with the effects of AI, and they feel it first and hardest. We talk about whether teens’ reaction is resilience or denial, how they’re using AI, what triage for AI in education looks like, positive uses of AI in schools but also the cheating problem and how schools are dealing with that, safeguarding kids’ use of AI, and how assessment should change. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . I have been talking with Ruchir Puri, the Chief Scientist of IBM Research, about their strategy and his take on many things related to AI. Ruchir is also Vice-President of IBM Corporate Technology and Technical Community. He led IBM Watson as its CTO and Chief Architect from 2016-19 and is a Fellow of the IEEE, and has been an ACM Distinguished Speaker, an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, and holder of the John Von Neumann Chair at the Institute of Discrete Mathematics at Bonn University in Germany. He holds over 70 US patents and has authored over 120 scientific papers. In our interview conclusion, we talk about Watson, and what happened with using it in medicine right after its Jeopardy! win, and the current state of Watson in governance and generative AI, Ruchir’s term and definition of Artificial Useful Intelligence, his invention of CodeNet, what it means for AI to write software and an amazing potential future of that, and the prospects for entry-level positions for computer science graduates and Ruchir’s advice to them. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . In all the news about and focus on startups like OpenAI and Anthropic, there’s a long-established player that doesn’t get as many soundbites but which deserves our attention: IBM. It’s important to understand what their current strategy and thinking is. And I have just the person to do that: Ruchir Puri, the Chief Scientist of IBM Research, and Vice-President of IBM Corporate Technology and Technical Community. He led IBM Watson as its CTO and Chief Architect from 2016-19 and is a Fellow of the IEEE, and has been an ACM Distinguished Speaker, an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, and was honored with John Von-Neumann Chair at Institute of Discrete Mathematics at Bonn University, Germany. Notably from our point of view, he is an inventor of over 70 US patents and has authored over 120 scientific papers, which lands him squarely in the technical perspective that we value so much on this show.  We talk about the continuing importance of the foundation of computer science, which is algorithms, the tension between the deterministic nature of algorithms and the more touchy-feely variability of generative AI interfaces, what that means for reliability and verifiability, how best to think about Gen AI, the history of IBM’s big AI projects like Watson and Deep Blue, and IBM’s ambitions in quantum computing and the role of AI in that. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . I have been talking with Maurice Chiodo, Assistant Research Professor at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, about his new paper titled Reframing AI Loss of Control: What Control Is, How to Have It, How to Lose It and everything that control of AI and loss of it means. Maurice is the principal investigator of the Ethics in Mathematics Project, holds two PhDs in mathematics, from Cambridge and the University of Melbourne, and has over a decade of experience working as an academic mathematician. He has direct industry experience with over 30 startups, having been a member of the Ethics Advisory Group at Machine Intelligence Garage UK for over 2 years. In this conclusion of the interview we talk about AI in wartime decision making, the mechanics of real-time detection of loss of control, the problems with putting a human in the loop, and some of the most serious scenarios of loss of control. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . With so much talk about the need to control AI, and notable incidents of losing control of it, like the OpenAI/HuggingFace incident among others, we will do a deep dive on what control or loss of control of AI means with the help of Maurice Chiodo, Assistant Research Professor at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, and the principal investigator of the Ethics in Mathematics Project, where he addresses the ethical challenges and risks posed by mathematics, mathematicians, and mathematically-powered technologies. Maurice holds two PhDs in mathematics, from the University of Cambridge and the University of Melbourne, and has over a decade of experience working as an academic mathematician on problems in algebra and computability theory. He has direct industry experience with over 30 startups, having been a member of the Ethics Advisory Group at Machine Intelligence Garage UK for over 2 years. But his recent paper titled Reframing AI Loss of Control: What Control Is, How to Have It, How to Lose It, forms the main reason for our interview. We talk about ethical issues in mathematics and whether there should be a Hippocratic oath for mathematicians, AI’s impact on mathematics in solving previously unsolved problems, how to define control and losing it (using sharks as an example), and the difference between operational, tactical, and strategic goals.  All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . We are back on the consciousness train again, trying to understand what that thing is. So I've been talking with Joscha Bach, renowned cognitive scientist who uses the lens of artificial intelligence to understand the human mind. He has taught and researched at Humboldt University of Berlin, the Institute for Cognitive Science in Osnabrück, the Berlin School of Mind and Brain, MIT’s Media Lab and the Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. He’s the creator of the MicroPsi cognitive architecture, the author of Principles of Synthetic Intelligence, and the executive director of the California Institute for Machine Consciousness. We conclude by talking about how to know if something is conscious, the role of memory, what Joscha thinks of Integrated Information Theory, applying the Turing Test to LLMs and whether they’re entitled to rights, substrate independence, or the portability of consciousness from one platform to another, the possibility of making a conscious AI, and the geopolitics of doing so.  All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.