28 episodes

From the producers of The World as You’ll Know It, a new series about the perils and promise of artificial intelligence with cognitive scientist, Gary Marcus. For all the progress in artificial intelligence over the last 70 years — computers can now beat people at chess and Go, detect fraud, give driving instructions and write like Shakespeare — we still don’t know how to build AI we can trust. The risks are serious, but the potential benefits of AI are too great to be ignored. In this special edition series, host Gary Marcus — cognitive scientist, best-selling author and AI entrepreneur — digs into AI’s history, present and future, bringing to life some of the technology’s most significant breakthroughs and failures. He enlists engineers, scientists, philosophers and journalists working at the forefront of AI to explore what’s wrong with our current approach and ways we might change it. Humans vs. Machines debuts this spring.

Humans vs. Machines with Gary Marcus Aventine Research Institute

    • Technology
    • 4.7 • 89 Ratings

From the producers of The World as You’ll Know It, a new series about the perils and promise of artificial intelligence with cognitive scientist, Gary Marcus. For all the progress in artificial intelligence over the last 70 years — computers can now beat people at chess and Go, detect fraud, give driving instructions and write like Shakespeare — we still don’t know how to build AI we can trust. The risks are serious, but the potential benefits of AI are too great to be ignored. In this special edition series, host Gary Marcus — cognitive scientist, best-selling author and AI entrepreneur — digs into AI’s history, present and future, bringing to life some of the technology’s most significant breakthroughs and failures. He enlists engineers, scientists, philosophers and journalists working at the forefront of AI to explore what’s wrong with our current approach and ways we might change it. Humans vs. Machines debuts this spring.

    The Race to Control AI

    The Race to Control AI

    In our final episode, Host Gary Marcus shares his hopes for and fears about an AI-driven future. On the one hand, AI could accelerate solutions to some of society’s most difficult problems; on the other, it could deepen existing problems and create new existential risks to humanity. Getting it right, Marcus emphasizes, depends on establishing both national and international standards for the industry as soon as possible. He is joined by Dr. Alondra Nelson, who led the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in 2021, and Brian Christian an AI researcher and the author of The Alignment Problem; Machine Learning and Human Values.

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    • 30 min
    When Bots Become Our Friends

    When Bots Become Our Friends

    Some people use chatbots for therapy. Others have fallen in love with them. And some people argue that AI systems have become sentient and are entitled to certain rights. In this episode, Gary Marcus explores our relationship with AI technology —  how it’s changing and where it might lead. He speaks with Blake Lemoine, an engineer who believes that a Google program has achieved sentience and even has feelings, Eugenia Kuyda, the founder and CEO of Replika, Anna Oakes, a lead producer and co-host of Bot Love, and Paul Bloom, a cognitive psychologist who believes we are on the forefront of a new age of human-machine interaction.

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    • 33 min
    AI Took My Career!

    AI Took My Career!

    The emergence of generative AI threatens to automate millions of jobs, potentially ushering in a new and unprecedented wave of job displacement. In the past, newly created jobs replaced those lost. Will that happen this time? To discuss this, Gary Marcus is joined by Amy Winter, a concept artist who sees generative AI as a threat to her career, Brian Merchant, the technology columnist for the Los Angeles Times and author of “Blood in the Machine: the Origins of the Rebellion against Big Tech”, and Dr. Erik Brynjolffson, an economist and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, that studies the effects of technology on the workforce. 

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    • 28 min
    How AI Will Turbocharge Misinformation

    How AI Will Turbocharge Misinformation

    Misinformation has already influenced our elections, ruined reputations and fundamentally changed society’s relationship with the truth. Now, large language models like GPT have the potential to create and spread misinformation at a speed and scale we’ve never seen before. As new technologies allow bad actors to imitate the way we write, the way we speak and the way we appear in photos and videos, the question won’t be, ‘What we can believe in?’ but whether we’ll be able to believe in anything at all. To discuss how we got here and what we must do to fix it, host Gary Marcus talks to Pranshu Verma and Will Oremus, two technology writers from the Washington Post, and Dr. Rumman Chowdhury, a leading expert in Ethical AI and former Director of the Ethics and Transparency team at Twitter.

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    • 27 min
    Can AI Make You Laugh?

    Can AI Make You Laugh?

    New large language models are capable of writing essays, drafting marketing pitches and having human-like exchanges on chat apps. But can they make us laugh the way a human can? To explore this, host Gary Marcus is joined by Dr. Naomi Saphra, an AI researcher and comedian, Bob Mankoff, former Cartoon Editor of The New Yorker magazine and Yejin Choi, a computer science professor at the University of Washington and 2022 MacArthur Fellow. While artificial intelligence systems can generate far more jokes than humans can, knowing what’s funny remains — at least for now — a uniquely human ability.

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    • 27 min
    What Happens When AI Takes The Wheel?

    What Happens When AI Takes The Wheel?

    We've been promised wide-scale driverless cars for more than a decade, but a true driverless experience still remains out of reach. It turns out that taking humans out of the loop is putting everyone on the road at risk. Host Gary Marcus talks to Cade Metz, a tech reporter for The New York Times and Dr. Missy Cummings, former senior safety advisor to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, to explore requirements that would make self-driving cars reliable and secure for everyone.

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    • 33 min

Customer Reviews

4.7 out of 5
89 Ratings

89 Ratings

Casnh ,

Very interesting and accessible

The host does an excellent job of extracting the most relevant information in a layman’s terms.
One criticism—in the episode on self-driving cars, it seems like a pretty big oversight not to compare rates of self-driving car accidents to regular accidents. Isn’t a central issue how the two compare? And how much better do self-driving cars need to be than humans on average before we’re willing to accept some risk with self-driving cars?

Murelega ,

Oh how are the mighty fallen.

I really enjoyed this show. Interesting guests, civil conversation, fascinating ideas.

But then… Marcus tells us that we should expand this wonderful idea of being non-binary to other things besides gender identity.

Sure, Jan. Gender identity is the product of a bogus, specious, incoherent ideology… and you want to take it as your model for thinking about stuff.

Stick to computers and AI and leave the difficult stuff to us feminists, Gary love.

JoelG Marietta ,

Incredibly valuable podcast

Gary Marcus is doing a great job of cutting through the hype and asking under-explored questions about AI. The show is professionally produced and enjoyable. Looking forward to more…

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