Artificial Intelligence and You

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.

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.

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.

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.