Artificial Intelligence and You

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .

I’ve been talking with award-winning documentary filmmaker James Barrat, author of last year’s book The Intelligence Explosion, who has been writing in this space since way back in 2013 with his book Our Final Invention. He’s worked with National Geographic, PBS, Discovery Channel, and leading broadcasters across Europe. I find the lens he sees the macro picture through to be usefully different to purely technical analyses.

We conclude the interview by talking about about living with the unpredictability of AI, expert systems, friendly AI, self-improvement and emergence, what finding agency looks like if AI isn’t halted, how media like documentaries can help the public narrative, recursive self-improvement, what you personally can take charge of, and what to hold on to as everything changes.

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/ .

Back in 2013 my attention was taken by a book called Our Final Invention, which was one of the few books that I’ve added to my physical library, coming as it did a year before even Bostrom’s Superintelligence. The author, James Barrat, made one of the earlier cases for the potentially dire path AI would set us on; he got into this food fight long before it looked like a place to attract lots of eyeballs. Last year he published another book called The Intelligence Explosion, and it makes the case even more forcefully. Barrat comes to this from an interesting background as an award-winning documentary filmmaker working with National Geographic, PBS, Discovery Channel, and leading broadcasters across Europe.

So we’re going to trace the evolution of the AI peril narrative from the time it was barely registering through to today’s white-hot frenzy. James brings a perspective that’s shaped by his background as a documentary filmmaker that I find very useful for how accessible it makes the macro concerns. It’s a good counterpoint to the often purely technical viewpoints we get here. We talk about regulation scenarios, Steve Omohundro’s rational agent theories, how our fiction shapes AI behavior, mechanistic interpretability, and accelerationism.

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 have been talking about how we reshape education to serve teens in an AI-transformed world with Rebecca Winthrop, co-author of the book The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better and leader of the Brookings Institution Global Task Force on AI in Education. Rebecca is a senior fellow and director of their Center for Universal Education, with a PhD in education from Columbia. She advises governments and other international institutions and has served as the chair of the U.N. Secretary General’s Global Education First Initiative’s Technical Advisory Group.

In our conclusion, Rebecca tells us how she tested her book on her own kids, engagement archetypes in students, ways of increasing their engagement and the value of actual essays, comparing teaching systems and expectations between Asia and the West, the effects of social media and smartphones, and the prospects for entry-level jobs.

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’ve talked many times in the past about AI being less like the introduction of a new technology and more like the introduction of an alien species to our planet. We’re going to talk about another alien species today: teenagers. I have teen and tween girls of my own, so this is personal. And to guide us through that is Rebecca Winthrop, co-author of the book The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better and leader of the Brookings Institution Global Task Force on AI in Education. She is a senior fellow and director of their Center for Universal Education, with a PhD in education from Columbia, and researching education globally, with special attention to the skills young people need to thrive in work, life, and as constructive citizens. She advises governments, international institutions, foundations, civil society organizations, and corporations on education issues and has served as the chair of the U.N. Secretary General’s Global Education First Initiative’s Technical Advisory Group.

I may have used a frivolous line at the start there but the topic is anything but. Teenagers are on the front lines of humanity’s engaging with the effects of AI, and they feel it first and hardest. We talk about whether teens’ reaction is resilience or denial, how they’re using AI, what triage for AI in education looks like, positive uses of AI in schools but also the cheating problem and how schools are dealing with that, safeguarding kids’ use of AI, and how assessment should change.

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 have been talking with Ruchir Puri, the Chief Scientist of IBM Research, about their strategy and his take on many things related to AI. Ruchir is also Vice-President of IBM Corporate Technology and Technical Community. He led IBM Watson as its CTO and Chief Architect from 2016-19 and is a Fellow of the IEEE, and has been an ACM Distinguished Speaker, an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, and holder of the John Von Neumann Chair at the Institute of Discrete Mathematics at Bonn University in Germany. He holds over 70 US patents and has authored over 120 scientific papers.

In our interview conclusion, we talk about Watson, and what happened with using it in medicine right after its Jeopardy! win, and the current state of Watson in governance and generative AI, Ruchir’s term and definition of Artificial Useful Intelligence, his invention of CodeNet, what it means for AI to write software and an amazing potential future of that, and the prospects for entry-level positions for computer science graduates and Ruchir’s advice to them.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines!

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.