In this podcast, first published in August 2020, we hear from machine learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio, who believes that creating a true artificial intelligence will only be possible once machines have something that babies are born with: the ability to interact with the world, observe what happens, and adapt to the consequences of their actions.

Yoshua Bengio (Photo copyright: Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation)

We'll find out how such agency helps us learn, what it could mean for computers to have it too, and hear about Bengio's work introducing it into an area of machine learning called deep learning.

And, in honour of the mathematician Ron Graham who sadly passed away in July 2020, we celebrate our very favourite number, Graham's number, by telling you about it in just one minute.

You can find out more about Bengio's take on agency in this series of articles, about machine learning in this article, and about Graham's number in this article.

The music in the podcast is by Oli Freke and the track is called Line-1. You can listen to more of Oli's music on Soundcloud.

This podcast was produced as part of our collaboration with the Isaac Newton Institute (INI) – you can find out more of our work with the INI here.