Artificial Intelligence and You

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Returning as our first three-peat guest is Roman Yampolskiy, tenured Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Louisville in Kentucky where he is also the director of the Cyber Security Laboratory. Roman is here to talk about his new book, AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable. Roman has been central in the field of warning about the Control Problem and Value Alignment Problems of AI from the very beginning, back when doing so earned people some scorn from practitioners, yet Roman is a professor of computer science and applies rigorous methods to his analyses of these problems. It’s those rigorous methods that we tap into in this interview, because Roman connects principles of computer science to the issue of existential risk from AI. In this part we talk about why this work is important to Roman, the dimensions of the elements of unexplainability, unpredictability, and uncontrollability, the level of urgency of the problems, and drill down into why today’s AI is not safe and why it’s getting worse. 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/ .   Artificial General Intelligence: Once upon a time, this was considered a pipe dream, a fantasy of dreamers with no sense of the practical limitations of real AI. That was last year. Now, AGI is an explicit goal of many enterprises, notably among them Simuli. Their CEO, Rachel St. Clair, co-founded the company with Ben Goertzel, who has also been on this show. Rachel is a Fellow of the Center for Future Mind, with a doctorate in Complex Systems and Brain Sciences from Florida Atlantic University. She researches artificial general intelligence, focusing on complex systems and neuromorphic learning algorithms. Her goal is to “help create human-like, conscious, artificial, general intelligence to help humans solve the worst of our problems.”  In the conclusion, we talk about the role of sleep in human cognition, AGI and consciousness, and… penguins. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.          

Guest Rachel St. Clair, AGI Scientist, discusses markers for AGI, distinctions between AGI and narrow AI, self-driving cars, robotics, embodiment, and even disco balls. Plus, insights on the quest for AGI, embodiment in AI, hypervectors, and AI in modern dating.

Reflecting on the evolving existential risk conversation around AI since 2017, from Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence to cryptic signatures like p(doom) and e/acc. Exploring ethical AI development, generative AI, mind-reading technology, brain imaging, economic inequality solutions, and future AI research.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   Increasing AI in weapons: is this a good thing (more selective targeting, fewer innocents killed) or bad (risk of losing control in critical situations)? It's hard to decide where to stand, and many people can't help but think of Skynet and don't get further. Here to help us pick through those arguments, calling from Munich is my guest, Frank Sauer, head of research at the Metis Institute for Strategy and Foresight and a senior research fellow at the Bundeswehr University in Munich. He has a Ph.D. from Goethe University in Frankfurt and is an expert in the field of international politics with a focus on security. His research focuses on the military application of artificial intelligence and robotics. He is a member of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. He also serves on the International Panel on the Regulation of Autonomous Weapons and the Expert Commission on the responsible use of technologies in the European Future Combat Air System.  In part two we talk about psychology of combat decisions, AI and strategic defense, and nuclear conflict destabilization. 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/ .   Increasing AI in weapons: is this a good thing (more selective targeting, fewer innocents killed) or bad (risk of losing control in critical situations)? It's hard to decide where to stand, and many people can't help but think of Skynet and don't get further. Here to help us pick through those arguments, calling from Munich is my guest, Frank Sauer, head of research at the Metis Institute for Strategy and Foresight and a senior research fellow at the Bundeswehr University in Munich. He has a Ph.D. from Goethe University in Frankfurt and is an expert in the field of international politics with a focus on security. His research focuses on the military application of artificial intelligence and robotics. He is a member of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. He also serves on the International Panel on the Regulation of Autonomous Weapons and the Expert Commission on the responsible use of technologies in the European Future Combat Air System.  In this first part we talk about the ethics of autonomy in weapons systems and compare human to machine decision making in combat. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.          

In this intriguing discussion, Peter Norvig, a leading AI researcher and co-author of the seminal text on artificial intelligence, explores the evolving narrative around AI as its presence grows in society. He shares his thoughts on the movement to pause AI advancements and delves into the challenges of general intelligence within large language models. The conversation touches on the ethical complexities of AI in an accessible world, the dual nature of data, and wraps up with humorous insights on AI interpreting chicken sounds.

AI professor/author/researcher Peter Norvig discusses the evolution of AI systems, the challenges of AI in chess, advancements and limitations in language processing of computers, and the development of a humanoid robot airplane pilot.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   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 In the second half of the interview, we pivot to the Theory of Mind – which is the ability of a creature to understand that another has a mind – and research around whether AI has it. Michal has amazing new research in that respect. He also says, "Without a question, GPT-4 and similar models are the most competent language users on this planet." All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.          

Guest Michal Kosinski, Professor of Psychology, discusses the Cambridge Analytica scandal, using Facebook likes to predict traits, the concept of privacy today, challenges and benefits of personal data collection, and the intersection of privacy, AI, and creativity.