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

When people take a unipolar position that AI is going to be wonderful, or terrible, or inconsequential, they end up painting themselves into a corner where that’s the only story they can allow themselves to express, and that obscures the truth. So for us to do our due diligence in exploring the dimensions of AI, today I am talking with Drs. Emily Bender and Alex Hanna, authors of the upcoming book, The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want, and also co-hosts of the live podcast Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000.

Emily is well known for coining the term “stochastic parrots” in a 2021 paper as a label for generative AI. She is a linguistics professor and director of the Computational Linguistics Laboratory at the University of Washington and was among the inaugural Time AI 100. Alex is a sociologist who looks at how the data that fuels AI technologies exacerbates racial, gender, and class inequality. She is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Applied Transgender Studies.

In part 1, we talk about their intentions with the book, cycles of hype and the effects of hype, the dangers of uncritical use of LLMs, “Slow Science”, and academic institutional culture. 

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/ .

How to manage the integration of AI at scale into the enterprise is the territory of today's guest, Diane Gutiw, Vice President and leader of the AI research center at the global business consultancy CGI. She holds a PhD in Medical Information Technology Management and has led collaborative strategy design and implementation planning for advanced analytics and AI for large organizations in the energy and utilities, railway, and government healthcare sectors. 

In part 2, we talk about synthetic data, digital triplets, agentic AI and continuous autonomous improvement, and best practices for compliance. 

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/ .

How to manage the integration of AI at scale into the enterprise is the territory of today's guest, Diane Gutiw, Vice President and leader of the AI research center at the global business consultancy CGI. She holds a PhD in Medical Information Technology Management and has led collaborative strategy design and implementation planning for advanced analytics and AI for large organizations in the energy and utilities, railway, and government healthcare sectors. 

We talk about how enterprises manage the integration of AI at the dizzying speeds of change today, where AI does and does not impact employment, how the HR department should change in those enterprises, how to deal with hallucinations, and how to manage the risks of deploying generative AI in customer solutions. 

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 talking about catastrophic risks, something that can be depressing for people who haven’t confronted these things before, and so I have had to be careful in talking about those with most audiences. Yet the paradox is that the more you do look at those risks, the more that effect fades, and that’s a good thing, because my guest today is someone who takes on the onerous task of thinking about and doing something about those risks every day. Seth Baum is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Global Catastrophic Risks Institute in New York, which has tackled the biggest of big problems since 2011. He is also a research affiliate at the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. He’s authored papers on pandemics, nuclear winter, and notably for our show, AI.

We talk about national bias in models, coherent extrapolated volition – like, what is it – the risks inherent in a world of numerous different models, and using AI itself to solve some of 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/ .

We're talking about catastrophic risks, something that can be depressing for people who haven’t confronted these things before, and so I have had to be careful in talking about those with most audiences. Yet the paradox is that the more you do look at those risks, the more that effect fades, and that’s a good thing, because my guest today is someone who takes on the onerous task of thinking about and doing something about those risks every day. Seth Baum is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Global Catastrophic Risks Institute in New York, which has tackled the biggest of big problems since 2011. He is also a research affiliate at the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. He’s authored papers on pandemics, nuclear winter, and notably for our show, AI.

We talk about how it feels to work on existential threats every day, AI as a horizontal risk as well as a vertical one, near-term value versus long-term value, AI being used to change the decisions of populations or voting blocs, and AI as a dual-use technology.

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/ .

AI will transform customer service. Large language models will provide superior customer interaction, whether by web or by telephone. They’ll answer instantly, always be polite and full of energy, talk with the customer in every known language, make all the information that the customer wants out of the company personalized and accessible to that customer. All of this is provably achievable.

So where is it? Has your customer service experience gotten better as a result of AI being added... or worse? I dig into that question on this special episode.

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 if… aliens came to visit the Earth? And what does that have to do with AI? I’ve deconstructed two of my TEDx talks on this show, but before both of those I did one in 2017, and here I take that one apart.

Why didn’t I do this before? It seemed a bit… out there. Too sensationalist. Making claims that were too extravagant.

But when I was looking at it again recently, I thought, we’ve actually caught up with what I was saying there, those ideas are more acceptable than they were in 2017. So I thought this was a good time to see how it’s aged and how on point it is. I’ll go through it, give a commentary.

I'll talk about the dichotomy of AI's existential promise vs peril, what it could mean for jobs, the motivations to create general AI, and the part we all play in establishing the values of what will become tomorrow's artificial superintelligences, and examine the interesting ways these narratives have changed in the last 8 years. Plus, aliens.

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/ .

In this special episode we are focused on the military use of AI, and making it even more special, we have not one guest but nine:

I've collected together portions of their appearances on earlier episodes of this show to create one interwoven narrative about the military use of AI. We talk about autonomy, killer drones, ethics of hands-off decision making, treaties, the perspectives of people and countries outside the major powers, risks of losing control, data center monitoring, and more. 

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 use of generative AI in legal practice has been in the news since lawyers filed briefs written by AI that contained completely fictional citations. But AI has moved past those faux pas to be of real benefit, used by some judges in writing their decisions. Here with his finger on that pulse is Adam Unikowsky, partner in the Appellate & Supreme Court practice group at Jenner & Block in Washington, DC.  He handles cases in numerous subject matter areas, including administrative law, and patent law.  He has argued 12 cases in the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as numerous cases in federal courts of appeals, federal district courts, and state supreme courts. He writes a newsletter on AI in law and other legal issues. Adam graduated from Harvard Law School and clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia.

We talk about how AI could litigate or even judge cases, and whether it should, how it can emulate specific judges, the current uptake, reliability, and reputation of AI in the legal profession, the best ways to use AI in litigation and what’s driving its adoption, something AI can do that humans can’t, how politics comes in, the future roles of litigators and AI’s effects on the apprenticeship of lawyers, AI in the appellate system, and upcoming innovation in AI and the law. 

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/ .

My guest has fundamentally reshaped the landscape of digital technology. Your experience of the Internet owes a large part of its identity to Tim O’Reilly, the founder, CEO, and Chairman of O’Reilly Media, the company that has been providing the picks and shovels of learning to the Silicon Valley gold rush for the past thirty-five years, a platform that has connected and informed the people at ground zero of the online revolution since before there was a World Wide Web, through every medium from books to blogs. And the man behind that company has catalyzed and promoted the great thought movements that shaped how the digital world unfolded, such as Open Source, the principle of freedom and transparency in sharing the code that makes up the moving parts of that world, notably through the Open Source Conference which was like Woodstock for developers and ran from the beginning of that era for many years and which I personally presented at many times. Named by Inc. magazine as the “Oracle of Silicon Valley,” Tim created the term “Web 2.0” to denote the shift towards the era where users like you and me participate by creating our own content, which turned into social media and which is now just part of the digital water we swim in. His 2017 book, WTF: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us explores the technological forces on our world and how to harness them for a better future.

We talk about the effects of generative AI on our work processes, what AI does to the value model of accessing information, meme stocks in the new economy, AGI, and preference alignment and market influencing leading to collective intelligence. Really.

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

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.