Artificial Intelligence and You

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.