PodQueue

Human-level (“general”) AI is more difficult to achieve than most people think. One key obstacle is relevance, a conceptual version of the frame problem. Another is lack of the semantic web. Yet another is the difficulty of computer vision. So artificial general intelligence (AGI) isn’t on the horizon. Possibly, it may never be achieved. No AGI means no Singularity.

Even so, there’s already plenty to worry about—and future AI advances will add more. Areas of concern include unemployment, computer companions, and autonomous robots (some, military). Worries about the (illusory) Singularity have had the good effect of waking up the AI community (and others) to these dangers. At last, they are being taken seriously.

Professor Margaret Boden is a world-leading academic in the study of intelligence, both artificial and otherwise. She is is Research Professor of Cognitive Science at the Department of informatics at the University of Sussex, where her work embraces the fields of artificial intelligence, psychology, philosophy, cognitive and computer science. She was the founding-Dean of Sussex University’s School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, a pioneering centre for research into intelligence and the mechanisms underlying it — in humans, other animals, or machines. The School’s teaching and research involves an unusual combination of the humanities, science, and technology.

Professor Boden has also been an important participant in the recent international discussions over the long-term impacts of AI. She was a member of the AAAI’s 08/09 Presidential Panel on long-term AI futures (http://www.aaai.org/Organization/presidential-panel.php), and also took part in the recent Puerto Rico conference on the Future of AI, co-organised by CSER (http://futureoflife.org/misc/ai_conference); she is therefore uniquely well-placed to discuss near- and long-term prospects in AI.

Investigative journalist Byron Tau exposes how a hidden alliance between technology companies and the government is creating a new American surveillance state.

Gary Goldman was a writer on “Total Recall”, a Philip K. Dick adaptation directed by Paul Verhoeven and starring Arnold Schwarzeneger. It was a big hit. So why do Gary and his writing partner, Angus Fletcher, have so much trouble selling another Philip K. Dick adaptation? They tell Malcolm that it all came down to a roller coaster ride of plot twists that even A-List action actors couldn’t stomach, and an early attempt at AI that was too dumb to pick a smart script.

The Dark Cloud: The hidden costs of a digital world with Guillaume Pitron

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Where does memory end and imagination begin? Autobiographical writing has occupied many of the most eloquent minds of our time. A panel of brilliant, envelope-pushing memoirists examines what happens when the most intimate details of a writer’s life become the subject of his or her professional work.

Course homepage:

https://sites.google.com/view/berkeley-cs294-158-sp20/home

Lecture Instructor: Alec Radford (OpenAI)

Course Instructors: Pieter Abbeel, Aravind Srinivas, Peter Chen, Jonathan Ho, Alex Li, Wilson Yan

CS294-158-SP20: Deep Unsupervised Learning

UC Berkeley, Spring 2020

Join Jason Resnikoff and Nelson Lichtenstein for a discussion of Resnikoff's new book "Labor's End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work." This event aired on March 1.

About the Book:

"Labor's End" traces the discourse around automation from its origins in the factory to its wide-ranging implications in political and social life. As Jason Resnikoff shows, the term automation expressed the conviction that industrial progress meant the inevitable abolition of manual labor from industry. But the real substance of the term reflected industry's desire to hide an intensification of human work--and labor's loss of power and protection--behind magnificent machinery and a starry-eyed faith in technological revolution. The rhetorical power of the automation ideology revealed and perpetuated a belief that the idea of freedom was incompatible with the activity of work. From there, political actors ruled out the workplace as a site of politics while some of labor's staunchest allies dismissed sped-up tasks, expanded workloads, and incipient deindustrialization in the name of technological progress. A forceful intellectual history, "Labor's End" challenges entrenched assumptions about automation's transformation of the American workplace.

Learn more here: https://go.illinois.edu/f21resnikoff

Jason Resnikoff is a Core Lecturer in the History Department at Columbia University. He specializes in labor history, the history of global capitalism, intellectual history, and the history of technology. His book, Labor’s End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work, explores the ideological origins of automation in the US in the middle of the twentieth century. You can find his work in Labor,  International Labor and Working-Class History, Tropics of Meta, Zócalo Public Square, Western Humanities Review, Paris Review Daily, and the Encyclopedia of American Recessions and Depressions. He is affiliated with Columbia University’s American Studies Department, where he advises undergraduate senior theses, as well as Columbia’s Justice in Education initiative, through which he teaches incarcerated students. His time working as an organizer for the United Auto Workers grounds his scholarship. His current research interests include the intersection of racism and technology.

Nelson Lichtenstein is Research Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. An historian of labor and political economy, he is the author or editor of 16 books, including a biography of the labor leader Walter Reuther and State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (2013). With Gary Gerstle and Alice O’Connor he edited Beyond the New Deal Order: From the Great Depression to the Great Recession. (2019); and with Roman Huret and Jean-Christian Vinel he edited a companion volume, Capitalism Contested: the New Deal and Its Legacies (2020). Other publications include, The Right and Labor in America: Politics, Ideology, and Imagination (2012), edited with Elizabeth Shermer, and The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business (2009). Lichtenstein is currently writing a history of economic thought and policymaking in the administration of Bill Clinton. He writes for Dissent, Jacobin, New Labor Forum, and American Prospect.

Dr. Rebecca Charbonneau is a science and SETI historian and a Karl Jansky Fellow at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

Professor Sir Terry Pratchett Inaugural Lecture "The Importance of Being Amazed about Absolutely Everything". 4 November 2010, Trinity College Dublin

Also see video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZnDAzHA3WM&feature=channel_video_title