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Artificial Intelligence and You

aiandyou

What is AI? How will it affect your life, your work, and your world?

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#326
Yesterday · 44 min
325 - Guest: Joscha Bach, AI Cognition Researcher, part 2
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.
#325
August 31 · 36 min
324 - Guest: Joscha Bach, AI Cognition Researcher, part 1
This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . We are back on the consciousness train again, trying to understand what that thing is. Most of us would cop to being conscious, but how many of us have any idea how to describe it, let alone test for it? Here to help with that is Joscha Bach, cognitive scientist, AI researcher, and philosopher 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 Media Lab and the Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. He’s the creator of the MicroPsi cognitive architecture and the author of Principles of Synthetic Intelligence. At Intel Labs, he led a team for cognitive AI. He is currently the executive director of the California Institute for Machine Consciousness where he draws on computer science, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy to ask how minds construct reality, how consciousness might emerge from computation, and what AI can teach us about ourselves. We talk about the Institute’s mission, the machine consciousness hypothesis, why we actually are in a particular kind of simulation, dreaming, the role of perceptions and predictions, and a fascinating take on the Chinese Room. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.
#324
August 24 · 27 min
323 - Special: Existential Risk: Where Are We At Now?
This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . The idea of AI posing an existential risk to the human race is kind of like the Terminator itself – it just keeps coming back. We'll look at some of the history of that issue, how attitudes towards it have waxed and waned over the years, and recent events where AIs have escaped their containers and the reactions - or lack thereof - to those incidents. What should we take away from this slow-motion train wreck and what should we do about it? All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.
#323
August 17 · 32 min
322 - Guest: Mohammed AlQuraishi, AI and Biology Researcher, part 2
This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . What is AI doing to medicine? Specifically, in molecular biology, and protein folding: figuring out the 3-D structure of proteins. Remember DeepMind's AlphaFold and the announcement of it predicting 200 million protein structures? I'm talking with one of the top researchers in the world, Professor Mohammed AlQuraishi of Columbia University’s Department of Systems Biology, and a member of their Program for Mathematical Genomics. He heads a lab focused on biological perspectives at the molecular and systems levels. He has an MS in statistics and a PhD in genetics from Stanford University and was a Departmental Fellow at Harvard Medical School. We conclude by talking about how the advent of AlphaFold landed in the protein folding community; how AI is about to transform molecular biology and scientific experimentation; the possibility of simulating a cell; OpenFold, Mohammed’s answer to the closed source parts of AlphaFold; and his vision for the next 10 years of the field. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.
#322
August 10 · 28 min
321 - Guest: Mohammed AlQuraishi, AI and Biology Researcher, part 1
This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . What is AI doing to medicine? Specifically, in molecular biology, and protein folding: figuring out the 3-D structure of proteins, which look like the output of a pasta-making machine on LSD. Remember DeepMind's AlphaFold and the announcement of it predicting 200 million protein structures? I have questions. And here to answer them is one of the top researchers in the world, Professor Mohammed AlQuraishi of Columbia University’s Department of Systems Biology, and a member of their Program for Mathematical Genomics. He heads a lab focused on biological perspectives at the molecular and systems levels. He has an MS in statistics and a PhD in genetics from Stanford University and was a Departmental Fellow at Harvard Medical School. As if that wasn’t enough, before this storied academic career, he founded two startups in the mobile computing space. We talk about Mohammed’s background in molecular biology, the big goals of that field and his North Star of understanding biology well enough to simulate it; why I haven’t yet seen the kind of revolutionary impact I was expecting from AlphaFold, what it means for a protein to fold and why it’s a big deal and how AlphaFold and similar models work at figuring that out. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.
#321
August 3 · 1 hr
320 - Special: What Have We Learned? A Retrospective
This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . If you’ve joined us in the last three years, you may not have ever scrolled back to look at the episodes of the show that aired before you came along. But every time I look back over them, I am struck by how much of the content is not just relevant, but deeply valuable. That’s fairly amazing in a world where AI goes through a fundamental change every quarter. Career advice like, “Become a prompt engineer” was once cutting edge and now is quaint and pointless. But we’ve always gone much deeper than that kind of flavor of the month. And so, to give you an idea of why it’s worth going back to episodes that aired even years ago, I’m going to list the episodes we’ve done since the last retrospective like this – which was a bit too long ago, it was episode 100 – and something interesting about each episode which will hopefully whet your appetite for scrolling back far enough to find it. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.
#320
July 27 · 38 min
319 - Guest: Rana Gujral, AI Author, part 2
This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . I am in the throes of interviewing Rana Gujral, who is CEO of Behavioral Signals, creating systems that infer intent, emotion, and deception risk from voice, deployed in application from financial services to defense. He has a TEDx talk with a million views, has keynoted at the World Government Summit and World Economic Forum, and was named Most Influential CEO by CEO Monthly. He is also author of the new book The AI Instinct: The Future of AI and Human Decision-Making, which is a much more philosophically deep work than I had been expecting, and we are discussing it at length. We talk about hybrid minds – humans plus AI – and Rana’s framework of model for those, and how to manage governance of a company that’s using hybrid minds, incorporating Rana’s idea of a synthetic empathy layer for AI and how to manage the boundaries between human and AI control, and where we need to make sure we continue to be challenged, and finally AI consciousness and how to integrate these high level concepts into an AI-forward business. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.
#319
July 20 · 35 min
318 - Guest: Rana Gujral, AI Author, part 1
This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . This week I am talking with Rana Gujral, author of the new book The AI Instinct: The Future of AI and Human Decision-Making, a deeply thoughtful, expansive, and philosophical book, like its author. Rana is CEO of Behavioral Signals, creating systems that infer intent, emotion, and deception risk from voice, deployed in application from financial services to defense. He has a TEDx talk with a million views, has keynoted at the World Government Summit and World Economic Forum, and was named Most Influential CEO by CEO Monthly. We talk about Rana’s idea of artificial general experience, whether we need AI with persistent memory and universal awareness, whether AGI needs a physical experience of the world - what we call a world model – and what video generation models reveal about that, the role of empathy, whether AGI will come through an understanding that we consciously design or through emerging from a sufficiently complex general design, whether we ourselves are stochastic parrots, and AI as augmenting vs replacing human judgement. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.
#318
July 13 · 26 min
317 - Special: Is AI In a Bubble?
This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . We're looking at whether AI is bubbling, popping, jumping the shark, or otherwise outstaying its welcome. I'll explore the Hype Curve, the two dimensions of the Jagged Frontier to keep in mind when tracking AI technologies along that curve, what drives backlash and why it's inevitable, and the state of expectations met or unmet across key sectors, getting into specific activity in the financial, educational, and regulatory spheres. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.
#317
July 6 · 29 min
316 - Guest: Gašper Beguš, Marine Linguist, part 2
This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . I am talking with Gašper Beguš, leading researcher in decoding the language of whales. He is Associate Professor of Linguistics at UC Berkeley and the Linguistics Lead at Project CETI, the Cetacean Translation Initiative, applying advanced machine learning and state-of-the-art robotics working in the eastern Caribbean. In his Berkeley Biological and Artificial Language lab, he also builds the most realistic models of human language learning. He’s been featured everywhere from the BBC and the Guardian to Time, The Atlantic, and National Geographic. In the conclusion of our interview, Gašper is going to introduce us to his whale family, talk about how we know whether translations are correct, what’s going on in the neural nets that decode whale language and the role that generative AI has played, the robots that they use, and whale emotions. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.
#316
June 29 · 33 min
315 - Guest: Gašper Beguš, Marine Linguist, part 1
This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . We're going underwater, to talk with whales. There have been some amazing breakthroughs recently in understanding the language of sperm whales, and AI plays a fascinating part in that. And even if you have no immediate intentions to go say hi to a whale, AI's part in this story has ramifications far outside the field of cetacean communication. Taking us through that is Gašper Beguš, whose recent research has produced one of the most startling advances yet in the quest to understand whale communication. Gašper is Associate Professor of Linguistics at UC Berkeley, where he focuses on interpretable AI, combining linguistics, cognitive science, machine learning, neuroscience, philology, and marine biology. He is the Linguistics Lead at Project CETI, a nonprofit organization applying advanced machine learning and state-of-the-art robotics to understanding whales, working in Dominica in the eastern Caribbean. In his Berkeley Biological and Artificial Language lab, he also builds the most realistic models of human language learning. He's been featured everywhere from the BBC and the Guardian to Time, The Atlantic, and National Geographic. We start with a fascinating backgrounder in linguistics, then talk about what's captivating about whales, comparing them to other vocalizing creatures, talk about communicating with aliens and interspecies communication, what language even means for whales, and… the birds and the bees. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.
#315
June 22 · 29 min
314 - Guest: Katja Grace, AI Impact Researcher, part 2
This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . I am talking with Katja Grace, founder of AI Impacts, a forecasting and risk research project focused on AI safety and governance. She has leveraged her passion and concern about AI risk into a significant role in, for instance, surveying the AI community for its evaluations of risk, which got her named to Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in AI for 2024. She is an expert on technological trajectories, model scaling, and anthropic reasoning. In our conclusion, we talk about predicting superintelligence, Katja’s p(doom), regulation, the Great Filter argument, and Katja’s childhood calculations for dealing with lethal snake encounters. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.
#314
June 15 · 27 min
313 - Guest: Katja Grace, AI Impact Researcher, part 1
This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . When you stop and really consider the existential risks of AI, it becomes very apparent that we should do something. Yet so few people do. Someone who’s attempting to make up for that is Katja Grace, founder of AI Impacts, a forecasting and risk research project focused on AI safety and governance. Her surveys of the AI community’s evaluations of risk have gotten her named to Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in AI for 2024 and her papers on those surveys have been some of the most discussed scientific papers of their time. She’s an expert on technological trajectories, model scaling, and anthropic reasoning. We talk about what’s driving Katja to do this work, the fundamental risks that she sees in AI, AI evolving unexpected goals, risks of agents, comparing unemployment risks and like extinction risks, artificial general intelligence, the stunning results of the surveys she’s run on when AI will have serious effects, and… Trojan Horse racing. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.
#313
June 8 · 30 min
312 - Guest: Tomaso Poggio, Computational Neuroscientist, part 2
This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . I have been talking with Tomaso Poggio, Eugene McDermott professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT and the Director of the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, and one of the founders of the field of computational neuroscience. Tomaso is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a founding fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. He develops models of brain function that illuminate human intelligence and builds intelligent machines that can mimic human performance His new book, Brains, Minds, Machines, The Mystery of Human Intelligence, the Enigmas of the Artificial, comes out this summer. We talk about learning in the brain and synaptic mechanisms, the role of sleep, what AI scientists should pay more attention to from neuroscience, other computational mechanisms in the brain besides neurons, connectomics, robotics, and… flies and worms. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.
#312
June 1 · 29 min
311 - Guest: Tomaso Poggio, Computational Neuroscientist, part 1
This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . Studying human intelligence is a matter of neuroscience, and creating software is a matter of computing, so creating artificial intelligence would be at the intersection of those fields, called computational neuroscience, and I have with me one of the founders of that field. Tomaso Poggio is the Eugene McDermott professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT and the Director of the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a founding fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. His home page says that he “develops models of brain function that illuminate human intelligence and builds intelligent machines that can mimic human performance.” Wow. His new book, Brains, Minds, Machines, The Mystery of Human Intelligence, the Enigmas of the Artificial, comes out this summer. Tomaso defines computational neuroscience, and then we talk about computation in the human brain, how large language models landed for him, holography, limitations of LLMs, and backpropagation equivalents in the human brain. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.
#311
May 25 · 43 min
310 - Guest: Michael Gerlich, Adaptability Thought Leader, part 2
This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . I'm talking with Professor Michael Gerlich . His new book, The Convenience Trap: What Happens When AI Becomes the Mind Behind Our Lives is about the threats to what I call our "cognitive autonomy" when we use AI the wrong way. And it turns out that the ways we tend to use it are mostly the wrong way, which was what Michael was talking about on the show last October, because he is the author of a widely-cited study showing that students’ use of AI for cognitive offloading impaired their critical thinking. But his new research shows that following what he calls the structured prompting protocol, of using your brain first, AI second, results in improved learning. Michael is the Head of Center for Strategic Corporate Foresight and Sustainability at SBS Swiss Business School. His research and publications largely focus on the societal impact of Artificial Intelligence. He’s also taught at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Cambridge, and other institutions. He’s also been an adviser to the President and the Prime Minister of Kyrgyzstan, the Uzbekistan Cabinet, and ministers of economic affairs in Azerbaijan. We conclude the interview by talking about conducting as a metaphor for directing our thinking, AI’s effects on group collaboration, the effects on humans who are reduced to being monitors of AI, the mental models schools have of AI, possible controls on children using AI, and how AI companies might improve their products to help with these problems. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.
#310
May 18 · 35 min
309 - Guest: Michael Gerlich, Adaptability Thought Leader, part 1
This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . Professor Michael Gerlich is back on the show, calling from Zurich, Switzerland. His new book, The Convenience Trap: What Happens When AI Becomes the Mind Behind Our Lives is about the threats to what I call our "cognitive autonomy" when we use AI the wrong way. And it turns out that the ways we tend to use it are mostly the wrong way, which was what Michael was talking about last October, because he is the author of a widely-cited study showing that students’ use of AI for cognitive offloading impaired their critical thinking. But his new research shows that following what he calls the structured prompting protocol, of using your brain first, AI second, results in improved learning. Michael is the Head of Center for Strategic Corporate Foresight and Sustainability at SBS Swiss Business School. His research and publications largely focus on the societal impact of Artificial Intelligence. He’s also taught at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Cambridge, and other institutions. He’s also been an adviser to the President and the Prime Minister of Kyrgyzstan, the Uzbekistan Cabinet, and ministers of economic affairs in Azerbaijan. We start with a - frankly shocking - story that shows how dependent students have become on AI, then talk about how to avoid cognitive offloading, how to use AI more effectively, the anchoring effect of AI use, using a GPS as an analogy, and the risks of unexamined AI use. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.
#309
May 11 · 26 min
308 - Guest: Jeremy Ney, Economic Policymaker, part 2
This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . What is AI doing and going to do to job opportunities? What does it mean to have enough, and who has too little, and what’s fair? One answer to that is to look at inequality; how different are the financial circumstances of one set of people compared to another? I continue talking with Jeremy Ney, Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School and author of an upcoming book about opportunity and inequality in America. He writes the American Inequality newsletter and was previously a macroeconomic policymaker at the Federal Reserve. His work on regional divides and economic mobility has appeared in TIME Magazine, Business Insider, BBC, NPR, PBS, and on the TED stage. In our conclusion, we talk about Universal Basic Income, taxes and other systems of wealth redistribution, whether AI should be treated as a public utility, AI and redlining, AI causing cognitive inequalities in education, and where we should be looking to for change. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.
#308
May 4 · 38 min
307 - Guest: Jeremy Ney, Economic Policymaker, part 1
This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . What is AI doing and going to do to job opportunities? What does it mean to have enough, and who has too little, and what’s fair? One answer to that is to look at inequality; how different are the financial circumstances of one set of people compared to another? Here to help us understand that is Jeremy Ney, Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School and author of an upcoming book about opportunity and inequality in America. He writes the American Inequality newsletter and was previously a macroeconomic policymaker at the Federal Reserve. His work on regional divides and economic mobility has appeared in TIME Magazine, Business Insider, BBC, NPR, PBS, and on the TED stage. We talk about how AI affects inequality in job availability, particularly recent college grads, and Jeremy has crunched a lot of current data about that. Is the answer to become a plumber or electrician? Where is the wealth dividend from automation going? We talk about the difference between low-wage and low-skill work, the Gini Coefficient, socioeconomic mobility, the cost of higher education vs the college wage premium and how schools and AI might democratize that dilemma. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.
#307
April 27 · 31 min
306 - Guest: Rob May, Intellectual Troublemaker, part 2
This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . I am talking with Rob May, Co-Founder and CEO of NeuroMetric AI, optimizing inference for multi-model AI systems, and returning to the show after 5 years. We're making sense of how rapid advances in AI—especially the shift from training to real-world inference—are reshaping work, business strategy, and the roles of humans. They accelerate productivity while increasing cognitive demands and redefining where human judgment still matters. A serial entrepreneur, Rob has founded and scaled multiple successful companies including Backupify, Talla, Dianthus, and BrandGuard. He’s also an active angel investor with over 100 portfolio companies and brings firsthand insight into the evolution of AI entrepreneurship. His expertise lies at the intersection of AI research, applied inference, and startup strategy. He is also the co-host of the AI in NYC Show, where he discusses the latest breakthroughs in AI infrastructure and reasoning with top founders, investors, and researchers. We conclude the interview by talking about AI processing on local devices, natural limits to automation, the shift in competitive advantage from execution to creativity, and restructuring of the economy and the workforce. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

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