Artificial Intelligence and You

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

I have been talking with Tomaso Poggio, Eugene McDermott professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT and the Director of the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, and one of the founders of the field of computational neuroscience. Tomaso is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a founding fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. He develops models of brain function that illuminate human intelligence and builds intelligent machines that can mimic human performance His new book, Brains, Minds, Machines, The Mystery of Human Intelligence, the Enigmas of the Artificial, comes out this summer.

We talk about learning in the brain and synaptic mechanisms, the role of sleep, what AI scientists should pay more attention to from neuroscience, other computational mechanisms in the brain besides neurons, connectomics, robotics, and… flies and worms.

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/ .

Studying human intelligence is a matter of neuroscience, and creating software is a matter of computing, so creating artificial intelligence would be at the intersection of those fields, called computational neuroscience, and I have with me one of the founders of that field. Tomaso Poggio is the Eugene McDermott professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT and the Director of the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a founding fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. His home page says that he “develops models of brain function that illuminate human intelligence and builds intelligent machines that can mimic human performance.” Wow. His new book, Brains, Minds, Machines, The Mystery of Human Intelligence, the Enigmas of the Artificial, comes out this summer.

Tomaso defines computational neuroscience, and then we talk about computation in the human brain, how large language models landed for him, holography, limitations of LLMs, and backpropagation equivalents in the human brain.

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'm talking with Professor Michael Gerlich . His new book, The Convenience Trap: What Happens When AI Becomes the Mind Behind Our Lives is about the threats to what I call our "cognitive autonomy" when we use AI the wrong way. And it turns out that the ways we tend to use it are mostly the wrong way, which was what Michael was talking about on the show last October, because he is the author of a widely-cited study showing that students’ use of AI for cognitive offloading impaired their critical thinking. But his new research shows that following what he calls the structured prompting protocol, of using your brain first, AI second, results in improved learning.

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. 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 conclude the interview by talking about conducting as a metaphor for directing our thinking, AI’s effects on group collaboration, the effects on humans who are reduced to being monitors of AI, the mental models schools have of AI, possible controls on children using AI, and how AI companies might improve their products to help with these problems.

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/ .

Professor Michael Gerlich is back on the show, calling from Zurich, Switzerland. His new book, The Convenience Trap: What Happens When AI Becomes the Mind Behind Our Lives is about the threats to what I call our "cognitive autonomy" when we use AI the wrong way. And it turns out that the ways we tend to use it are mostly the wrong way, which was what Michael was talking about last October, because he is the author of a widely-cited study showing that students’ use of AI for cognitive offloading impaired their critical thinking. But his new research shows that following what he calls the structured prompting protocol, of using your brain first, AI second, results in improved learning.

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. 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 start with a - frankly shocking - story that shows how dependent students have become on AI, then talk about how to avoid cognitive offloading, how to use AI more effectively, the anchoring effect of AI use, using a GPS as an analogy, and the risks of unexamined AI use.

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 and going to do to job opportunities? What does it mean to have enough, and who has too little, and what’s fair? One answer to that is to look at inequality; how different are the financial circumstances of one set of people compared to another?

I continue talking with Jeremy Ney, Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School and author of an upcoming book about opportunity and inequality in America. He writes the American Inequality newsletter and was previously a macroeconomic policymaker at the Federal Reserve. His work on regional divides and economic mobility has appeared in TIME Magazine, Business Insider, BBC, NPR, PBS, and on the TED stage.

In our conclusion, we talk about Universal Basic Income, taxes and other systems of wealth redistribution, whether AI should be treated as a public utility, AI and redlining, AI causing cognitive inequalities in education, and where we should be looking to for change.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.