Artificial Intelligence and You

aiandyou

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

  1. 2 DAYS AGO

    276 - Guest: Michael Gerlich, Adaptability Thought Leader, part 1

    This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . As we use AI more and more as a critical assistant, what might that be doing to our critical thinking? Professor Michael Gerlich has published his research in the paper “AI Tools In Society: Impacts On Cognitive Offloading And The Future Of Critical Thinking” in the journal Societies. He showed that younger participants “exhibited higher dependence on AI tools and lower critical thinking scores compared to older participants.” That’s the sort of result that demands we pay attention at a time when AI is being increasingly used by schools and students. 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, which has made him in demand as a speaker around the world. 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 talk about “cognitive offloading” and the use of GenAI. Why is it different from using calculators, which were widely forecast to cause math skills to atrophy and were banned from schools, and we since learned better. Michael will look at how AI like the big agents that might come with workplace IT systems help or hinder in knowledge work, and consequences for on-the-job training. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

    37 min

  2. 22 SEPT

    275 - Guest: Carl Benedikt Frey, Professor of AI and Work, part 2

    This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .     "The book seems to be more timely than originally anticipated."  I'm talking with Carl Benedikt Frey about his new book, How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations, and its exploration of the political and economic effects of policies like tariffs and university defunding comes at a very critical time. AI is projected to have enormous economic and social impacts that call for the biggest of big picture thinking, and Frey is the co-author of the 2013 study The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerization, which has received over 12,000 citations. He is Associate Professor of AI and Work at the Oxford Internet Institute and Director and Founder of the Future of Work Programme at the Oxford Martin School, both at the University of Oxford. His 2019 book, The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation, was selected as a Financial Times Best Book of the Year and awarded Princeton University’s Richard A. Lester Prize.   In the conclusion, we talk about the links between innovation and industry productivity, why AI hasn’t yet delivered broad gains, automation’s uneven effects on workers, the role of antitrust in sustaining competition, and the need for institutions like Oxford to adapt. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

    28 min

  3. 15 SEPT

    274 - Guest: Carl Benedikt Frey, Professor of AI and Work, part 1

    This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .     "The book seems to be more timely than originally anticipated."  I'm talking with Carl Benedikt Frey about his new book, How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations, and its exploration of the political and economic effects of policies like tariffs and university defunding comes at a very critical time. AI is projected to have enormous economic and social impacts that call for the biggest of big picture thinking, and Frey is the co-author of the 2013 study The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerization, which has received over 12,000 citations. He is Associate Professor of AI and Work at the Oxford Internet Institute and Director and Founder of the Future of Work Programme at the Oxford Martin School, both at the University of Oxford. His 2019 book, The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation, was selected as a Financial Times Best Book of the Year and awarded Princeton University’s Richard A. Lester Prize.   We talk about whether progress is inevitable, how growth depends on the interplay of technology and institutions, the link between productivity and innovation, the importance of institutional flexibility and decentralized funding, the effects of tariffs, the risks of China’s increasingly centralized model, and why the US and China are both triggering declining dynamism in each other. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

    35 min

  4. 8 SEPT

    273 - Guest: Megan Peters, Computational Cognitive Scientist, part 2

    This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .     I'm talking with Megan Peters, who researches thinking about thinking, or metacognition. She is an Associate Professor in the UC Irvine Department of Cognitive Sciences, studying how the brain represents and uses uncertainty, focusing on how these abilities support metacognitive evaluations of the quality of our decisions. She’s a Fellow in the UCI Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, the UCI Center for Theoretical Behavioral Sciences, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Brain Mind & Consciousness program. She’s also President and Co-founder of Neuromatch, an educational platform serving over 30,000 students in over 120 countries across computational neurosciences, deep learning, computational climate science, and neuroAI. In our conclusion, we talk about Turing Tests, measuring the brain, the Haunted Mansion, some cool experiments on brains, and… cats. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

    34 min

  5. 1 SEPT

    272 - Guest: Megan Peters, Computational Cognitive Scientist, part 1

    This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . Have you ever thought about thinking? That’s called metacognition, and Megan Peters thinks about that, a lot. She is an Associate Professor in the UC Irvine Department of Cognitive Sciences, researching how the brain represents and uses uncertainty, focusing on how these abilities support metacognitive evaluations of the quality of our decisions. She’s a Fellow in the UCI Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, the UCI Center for Theoretical Behavioral Sciences, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Brain Mind & Consciousness program. She’s also President and Co-founder of Neuromatch, an educational platform serving over 30,000 students in over 120 countries across computational neurosciences, deep learning, computational climate science, and neuroAI. We get really meta here: talking about thinking about thinking,  how we build models of the world, how language shapes our thinking, whether AI is doing metacognition in its chains of thought, statistical learning in AIs and humans, consciousness in humans and animals and AIs, and theories of consciousness. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

    41 min

  6. 25 AUG

    271 - Guest: Christof Koch, Cognitive Scientist, part 2

    This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . I am talking with neuroscientist Christof Koch, and as he says, "How is it that we, a piece of furniture of the universe like a rock or a star or a tree, can love or hate or see or hear?" What, in other words, makes us conscious, and what does that mean? He is known for his work exploring the substrate of consciousness in humans, animals, and machines and is the author of more than 350 peer-reviewed publications and five books, the latest of which is Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It. A physicist and neurobiologist, he was for more than a quarter of a century a professor of biology and engineering at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. In 2011, he became the Chief Scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle and in 2015, its president; now a Meritorious Investigator. He is also the Chief Scientist of the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation in Santa Monica, seeking to understand consciousness, its place in nature, and how this knowledge can benefit all of humanity. In part 2, we talk about a theory of consciousness that Christof is a primary researcher of: Integrated Information Theory, and tools for detecting and measuring consciousness, the magic number φ, the possibility of consciousness transfer, philosophical zombies, and neural correlates of consciousness. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

    41 min

  7. 18 AUG

    270 - Guest: Christof Koch, Cognitive Scientist, part 1

    This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . As my guest today says, "How is it that we, a piece of furniture of the universe like a rock or a star or a tree, can love or hate or see or hear?" What, in other words, makes us conscious, and what does that mean? He is the cognitive scientist Christof Koch, known for his work exploring the substrate of consciousness in humans, animals, and machines. He is the author of more than 350 peer-reviewed publications and five books, the latest of which is Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It. A physicist and neurobiologist, he was for more than a quarter of a century a professor of biology and engineering at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. In 2011, he became the Chief Scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle and in 2015, its president; now a Meritorious Investigator. He is also the Chief Scientist of the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation in Santa Monica, seeking to understand consciousness, its place in nature, and how this knowledge can benefit all of humanity. Why is an AI show interested in consciousness? Because the questions constantly arise, is AI conscious? How will we know when it is? How can or should we make it conscious? And if we can’t answer those questions for human beings, how will we answer them for anything else? We talk about the relationships between existence, identity, quantum mechanics, language, and consciousness, and cosmic consciousness, how conscious parts of your body might be, connecting brains to each other, including an example that’s already happened, and… opera. It is possibly literally mind blowing. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

    37 min

  8. 11 AUG

    269 - Guest: De Kai, Pioneer of Google Translate, part 2

    This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . "We are in the privileged - or unfortunate - situation of being the last generation of humans to be parenting AIs. All the future generations of AIs are going to be parented mainly by AIs. And so even more than with our human children and grandchildren, we have one shot at raising this next generation correctly." I am talking with De Kai, a pioneering professor of AI who built the web’s first global online language translator that spawned Google Translate and Microsoft Bing Translator, and author of new book, Raising AI: An Essential Guide to Parenting Our Future. De Kai was honored by the Association for Computational Linguistics as one of its 17 Founding Fellows and holds joint appointments at HKUST’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering and Division of Arts and Machine Creativity, and at Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute. He is Independent Director of the AI ethics think tank The Future Society and was one of eight inaugural members of Google’s AI ethics council. So he’s helped create some of the most important mechanisms and institutions of the modern AI age. In the conclusion of our interview, we talk about how to parent AI and what that means, responsibilities of the AI companies, a kind of parent-teacher association for AI and how to get involved, and our responsibilities to the next generation. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

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

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