AI overview: 1. From the Greeks to the Big Bang

AI is a subject that we will all benefit from understanding better. In this episode, co-hosts Calum Chace and David Wood review progress in AI from the Greeks to the 2012 "Big Bang".

00.05: A prediction
01.09: AI is likely to cause two singularities in this pivotal century - a jobless economy, and superintelligence
02.22: Counterpoint: it may require AGI to displace most people from the workforce. So only one singularity?
03.27: Jobs are nowhere near all that matters in humans
04.11: Are the "Three Cs jobs" safe? Those involving Creativity, Compassion, and Commonsense? Probably not.
05.15: 2012, the Big Bang in AI
05.48: AI now makes money. Google and Facebook ate Rupert Murdoch's lunch
06.30: AI might make the difference between military success and military failure. So there's a geopolitical race as well as a commercial race
07.18: Defining AI.
09.03: Intelligence vs Consciousness
10.15: Does the Turing Test test for Intelligence or Consciousness?
12.30: Can customer service agents pass the Turing Test?
13.07: Attributing consciousness by brain architecture or by behaviour
15.13: Creativity. Move 37 in game two of AlphaGo vs Lee Sedol, and Hassabis' three buckets of creativity
17.13: Music and art produced by AI as examples
19.05: History: Start with the Greeks, Hephaestus (Vulcan to the Romans) built automata, and Aristotle speculated about technological unemployment
19.58: AI has featured in science fiction from the beginning, eg Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Samuel Butler's Erewhon, E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops"
20.55: Post-WW2 developments. Conference in Paris in 1951 on "Computing machines and human thought". Norbert Weiner and cybernetics
22.48: The Dartmouth Conference
23.55: Perceptrons - very simple models of the human brain
25.13: Perceptrons debunked by Minsky and Papert, so Symbolic AI takes over
25.49: This debunking was a mistake. More data and better hardware overcomes the hurdles
27.20: Two AI winters, when research funding dries up 
28.07: David was taught maths at Cambridge by James Lighthill, author of the report which helped cause the first AI winter
28.58: The Japanese 5th generation computing project under-delivered in the 1980s. But it prompted an AI revival, and its ambitions have been realised by more recent advances
30.45: No more AI winters?

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

For more about the podcast hosts, see https://calumchace.com/ and https://dw2blog.com/

An Acxiom podcast where we discuss marketing made better, bringing you real...

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify