Artificial Intelligence and You

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . My guest today founded the United Kingdom's AI in Education initiative, but Sir Anthony Seldon is known to millions more there as the author of books about prime ministers, having just published one about Liz Truss. Sir Anthony is one of Britain’s leading contemporary historians, educationalists, commentators and political authors. For 20 years he was a transformative headmaster (“principal” in North American lingo) first at Brighton College and then Wellington College, one of the country’s leading independent schools. From 2015 to 2020 he served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham. He is now head of Epsom College. He is the author or editor of over 35 books on contemporary history, including insider accounts on the last six prime ministers. In 2018 he wrote The Fourth Education Revolution, which anticipates stunning, unprecedented effects of AI on education. He was knighted in 2014 for services to education and modern political history.  Managing to avoid nearly all the potential Truss references, I talked with him about how teachers should think about the size of the impact of AI on education, the benefits of AI to students and teachers, what the AI in Education initiative is doing, and what the best role of teachers in the classroom is in the AI age. 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/ . How is work shifting from jobs to skills, and how do companies and individuals adapt to this AI-fueled change? I talk with Ravin Jesuthasan, co-author with Tanuj Kapilashrami of the new book, The Skills-Powered Organization: The Journey to The Next Generation Enterprise, released on October 1. Ravin is Senior Partner and Global Leader for Transformation Services at Mercer. He is a member of the World Economic Forum's Future Skills Executive Board and of the Global Foresight Network. He is the author of the bestselling books Work without Jobs, as well as the books Transformative HR, Lead the Work, and Reinventing Jobs. He was featured on PBS’s documentary series “Future of Work,” has been recognized as one of the top 8 future of work influencers by Tech News, and as one of the top 100 HR influencers by HR Executive. In the conclusion, we talk about how AI is reshaping HR functions, including hiring, staffing, and restructuring processes, the role of AI in mentoring and augmenting work, the relationship between the future of work and the future of education, the real value of a degree today, and how AI affects privilege and inequality in the new work environment. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.          

Ravin Jesuthasan, a bestselling futurist and authority on human capital, delves into the transformative shifts in work due to AI. He discusses the move from traditional job roles to a skills-based approach, emphasizing transferable skills like teamwork and critical thinking. The conversation also highlights how AI is revolutionizing healthcare communication and the evolving role of HR in nurturing a more agile workforce. With insights into the future of work, Ravin sheds light on opportunities amidst these changes.

Craig A. Kaplan, an AGI expert and founder of iQ Company, dives deep into the world of Artificial General Intelligence. He discusses how AI can mirror human intelligence through innovative architectures and collective decision-making processes. Kaplan emphasizes the importance of safety and ethical frameworks in developing superintelligent AI. He also shares insights on navigating complex problem spaces and the collaboration between humans and AI. Finally, the morality of AI agents and the risks of misalignment with human values take center stage.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . Artificial General Intelligence - AGI - an AI system that’s as intelligent as an average human being in all the ways that human beings are usually intelligent. Helping us understand what it means and how we might get there is Craig A. Kaplan, founder of iQ Company, where he invents advanced intelligence systems. He also founded and ran PredictWallStreet, a financial services firm whose clients included NASDAQ, TD Ameritrade, Schwab, and other well-known financial institutions. In 2018, PredictWallStreet harnessed the collective intelligence of millions of retail investors to power a top 10 hedge fund performance, and we talk about it in this episode. Craig is a visiting professor in computer science at the University of California, and earned master’s and doctoral degrees from famed robotics hub Carnegie Mellon University, where he co-authored research with the Nobel-Prize-winning economist and AI pioneer Dr. Herbert A. Simon. We talk about his work with Herb Simon, bounded rationality, connectionist vs symbolic architectures, jailbreaking large language models, collective intelligence architectures for AI, and a lot more! 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 talking about international governance of AI again today, a field that is just growing and growing as governments across the globe grapple with the seemingly intractable idea of regulating something they don’t understand. Helping them understand that is Markus Anderljung, Director of Policy and Research at the Centre for the Governance of AI in the UK. He aims to produce rigorous recommendations for governments and AI companies, researching frontier AI regulation, responsible cutting-edge development, national security implications of AI, and compute governance. He is an Adjunct Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, and a member of the OECD AI Policy Observatory’s Expert Group on AI Futures. He was previously seconded to the UK Cabinet Office as a Senior Policy Specialist. I know “governance” sounds really dry and a million miles away from the drama of existential threats, and jobs going away, and loss of privacy on a global scale; but governance is exactly the mechanism by which we can hope to do something about all of those things. Whenever you say, or you hear someone say, “Someone ought to do something about that,” governance is what answers that call. In the conclusion, we talk about verification processes, ingenious schemes to verify hardware platforms, the frontier AI safety commitments, and who should set safety standards for the industry. 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 talking about international governance of AI again today, a field that is just growing and growing as governments across the globe grapple with the seemingly intractable idea of regulating something they don’t understand. Helping them understand that is Markus Anderljung, Director of Policy and Research at the Centre for the Governance of AI in the UK. He aims to produce rigorous recommendations for governments and AI companies, researching frontier AI regulation, responsible cutting-edge development, national security implications of AI, and compute governance. He is an Adjunct Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, and a member of the OECD AI Policy Observatory’s Expert Group on AI Futures. He was previously seconded to the UK Cabinet Office as a Senior Policy Specialist. I know “governance” sounds really dry and a million miles away from the drama of existential threats, and jobs going away, and loss of privacy on a global scale; but governance is exactly the mechanism by which we can hope to do something about all of those things. Whenever you say, or you hear someone say, “Someone ought to do something about that,” governance is what answers that call. We talk about just what the Centre is, what it does and how it does it, and definitions of artificial general intelligence insofar as they affect governance – just what is the difference between training a system with 1025 and 1026 flops, for instance? And also in this part Markus will talk about how monitoring and verification might specifically work. 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/ . Virtually everything that’s difficult about getting computers to do work for us is in getting them to understand our question or request and in our understanding their answer. How we interact with them is the problem. And that's where Sophie Kleber comes in. She is the UX – that’s User Experience – Director for the Future of Work at Google and an expert in ethical AI and future human-machine interaction. She deeply understands the emotional development of automated assistants, artificial intelligence, and physical spaces. Sophie develops technology that enables individuals to be their best selves. Before joining Google, Sophie held the Global Executive Creative Director role at Huge, collaborating with brands like IKEA and Thomson Reuters. She holds an MA in Communication Design and an MBA in Product Design, and is a Fulbright fellow.  In the conclusion of our interview, we talk about about how she got into the user experience field, the emergence of a third paradigm of user interfaces, the future of smart homes, privacy, large language models coming to consumer devices, and brain-computer interfaces. 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/ . Virtually everything that’s difficult about getting computers to do work for us is in getting them to understand our question or request and in our understanding their answer. How we interact with them is the problem. And that's where Sophie Kleber comes in. She is the UX – that’s User Experience – Director for the Future of Work at Google and an expert in ethical AI and future human-machine interaction. She deeply understands the emotional development of automated assistants, artificial intelligence, and physical spaces. Sophie develops technology that enables individuals to be their best selves. Before joining Google, Sophie held the Global Executive Creative Director role at Huge, collaborating with brands like IKEA and Thomson Reuters. She holds an MA in Communication Design and an MBA in Product Design, and is a Fulbright fellow.  We talk about the Uncanny Valley and how we relate to computers as though they were human or inhuman, and what if they looked like Bugs Bunny. We talk about the environments and situations where some people have intimate relationships with AIs, gender stereotyping in large language models, and where emotional interactions with computers help or hinder. 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/ . Teachers all over the world right now are having similar thoughts: Is AI going to take my job? How do I deal with homework that might have been done by ChatGPT? I know, because I've talked with many teachers, and these are universal concerns. So I'm visiting the topic of AI in education - not for the first time, not for the last. There are important and urgent issues to tackle; they become most acute at the high school level, but this episode will be useful for all levels. The reason it's so important for me to work with schools so much as an AI change management consultant is that there's no need for teachers to fear for their jobs. They are doing the most important job on the planet right now because they are literally educating the generation that is going to save the world. And generative AI has not created a learning problem: it's created learning opportunities. It's not created a teaching problem; it's created teaching opportunities. It has, however, created an assessment problem, and I'll talk about that. Kids need their human teachers more than ever before to model for them how to deal with disruption from technology, because change will never again happen as slowly as it does today, and all of their careers will be disrupted far more than anyone's is today. No student is going to remember something ChatGPT said for the rest of their life. The teacher’s job is to focus on the qualities that the AI cannot embody—the personal interactions that occur face to face when the teacher makes that lasting impression that inspires the student. Let's have honest, deep, and productive conversations about these issues now. A new school year is approaching and this is the time. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.