Author Pamela McCorduck talks with Jim about themes of her latest book, This Could Be Important: My Life and Times with the Artificial Intelligentsia. They talk about C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures thesis that explores the divide between the humanities & sciences, Pamela’s professional & personal friendships with AI pioneers (Julian Feldman, Allen Newell, Marvin Minsky, Ed Feigenbaum, Raj Reddy & Herb Simon), how language is related to AI, symbolic vs. deep learning, drinking sherry with Herb Simon, how her writings on AI were perceived by publishers, scientists & creatives, Arno Penzias’ strong views on AI, potential risks & rewards of future AI, computational art, and the progress of feminism in academia & culture at large.

EP20 Pamela McCorduck on Her Life & Times with AI

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Jim talks with Richard Bartlett about the ideas in his essay "What we learned from a 3-month co-living experiment." They discuss Jim's visit to a co-living house, community & its recent decline, starting small & iterating, the co-living experiment in Andalusia, pre-registration, co-living plus events, finding the right place, the importance of landscape, the vibe, finances, membrane design, organizing transit, events, the emergent TPOT network, paying community organizers what they're worth, weaving weak links & strong links, social transitivity, curation, selection criteria, containment vs ejection, a pluralistic attitude toward respect, assuming good faith, focusing on what you want to see more of, systems for participation & coordination, the danger of oversystematizing, resentment minimization, just-in-time system design, increasing capacity for hosting, the arrival process, mastering hospitality, biasing toward small-group participation, unscheduled time, what's next, GameB finance, and much more.

EP 234 Richard Bartlett on an Experiment in Co-Living

Jim talks with Robert Conan Ryan about seven ethical perspectives and why everyone should know them. They discuss why understanding ethical stances is valuable, a horseshoe spectrum, pragmatism, virtue ethics, consequentialism, deontology, elitist power, deification, social justice, stacking up ethical stances, Aristotle's golden mean, sociopaths in the military, running the polis, coherent pluralism, the multi-perspectival lens, Cornel West's positional complexity, paideia, DEI (Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion), liberal universal humanism, pragmatism vs neo-pragmatism, the long run vs the short run, the transaction cost theory of ethics, inclusive entrepreneurship, the Main Street problem, and much more.

EP 233 Robert Conan Ryan on Seven Ethical Perspectives

Jim talks with Matthew David Segall about the ideas in his and Bruce Damer's new essay, "The Cosmological Context of the Origin of Life: Process Philosophy and the Hot Spring Hypothesis." They discuss the "philosophy as footnotes to Plato" idea, the hot springs origin of life hypothesis, closing the gap between chemistry & life, Whitehead's idea of concrescence, metaphysics in philosophy, minimum viable metaphysics, why physical law doesn't imply biological organisms, process-relational philosophy, deep-seated cosmic habits, the hero's answer, the type 1a supernova, rigorous speculation, the incalculability of the adjacent possible, the nature of matter, autocatalysis, the tension between the actual & possible, the rate of evolution, getting past the error catastrophe, Prigogine's ideas about dissipative systems, teleology & the second law of thermodynamics, why DNA is not a blueprint, the Fermi paradox, bringing the universe to life, social implications of the origin of life, panpsychism & panexperientialism, integrated information theory, why matter & energy must have an endogenous telos, prehension, life wanting to live better, necessity & openness, questioning falsifiability, and much more.

EP 232 Matthew David Segall on Process Philosophy and the Origin of Life

Vance Crowe interviews Jim about how he maps the problem-space of current and future AI risk. They discuss the beginnings of AI, the era of broad AI, artificial general intelligence, the Wozniak test, artificial superintelligence, the paperclip maximizer problem, the timeline of AGI, FOOM, limitations of current governance structure, bad uses of narrow AI, personalized political propaganda, nanny rails, the multipolar trap, the spark of human ingenuity, Daniel Dennett's proposal to make human impersonation illegal, taking moral ownership of LLM outputs, loss of human cognitive capacity, Idiocracy, economic inequality & unemployment, David Graeber's bullshit jobs idea, Marx's concept of alienation, the flood of sludge, the idea of an AI information agent, epistemological decay, techno-hygiene tactics, GameA's self-terminating & accelerating curve, GameB, the importance of governance capacity, changing our political operating system, and much more.

EP 231 Vance Crowe Interviews Jim Rutt on AI Risk

Jim talks with James Lindsay about the ideas in his recent essay "National Divorce Is National Suicide." They discuss the meaning of a national divorce (where the United States would split into two countries), different shapes it could take, the possibility of parallel experiments in civilization design, statistics on support for the idea, the proposed Belgian split, steelmanning the opposition, reducing the chances of a Civil War, the divide over gun rights & abortion, the Big Sort, why national divorce would be a disaster, how the media would frame a national divorce, bifurcation of constitutional evolution, whether we're in a historically precedented moment, the idea of an attempted silent takeover of the West, fast & slow options for red state development, malice vs incompetence, amount of immigration between the U.S. and Canada, consequences & origins of intersectionality, competence of a blue state, wokery as a religion, what we should do instead of a divorce, fighting for a more constitutionally centered society, a civic revival, the passing of peak woke, and much more.

EP20 Pamela McCorduck on Her Life & Times with AI

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