The Gradient: Perspectives on AI

Episode 137

I spoke with Davidad Dalrymple about:

* His perspectives on AI risk

* ARIA (the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency) and its Safeguarded AI Programme

Enjoy—and let me know what you think!

Davidad is a Programme Director at ARIA. He was most recently a Research Fellow in technical AI safety at Oxford. He co-invented the top-40 cryptocurrency Filecoin, led an international neuroscience collaboration, and was a senior software engineer at Twitter and multiple startups.

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Episode 136

I spoke with Clive Thompson about:

* How he writes

* Writing about the climate and biking across the US

* Technology culture and persistent debates in AI

* Poetry

Enjoy—and let me know what you think!

Clive is a journalist who writes about science and technology. He is a contributing writer forWired magazine, and is currently writing his next book about micromobility and cycling across the US.

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Episode 136

I spoke with Judy Fan about:

* Our use of physical artifacts for sensemaking

* Why cognitive tools can be a double-edged sword

* Her approach to scientific inquiry and how that approach has developed

Enjoy—and let me know what you think!

Judy is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford and director of the Cognitive Tools Lab. Her lab employs converging approaches from cognitive science, computational neuroscience, and artificial intelligence to reverse engineer the human cognitive toolkit, especially how people use physical representations of thought — such as sketches and...

Episode 135

I spoke with L. M. Sacasas about:

* His writing and intellectual influences

* The value of asking hard questions about technology and our relationship to it

* What happens when we decide to outsource skills and competency

* Evolving notions of what it means to be human and questions about how to live a good life

Enjoy—and let me know what you think!

Michael is Executive Director of the Christian Study Center of Gainesville, Florida and author of The Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and so...

Episode 134

I spoke with Pete Wolfendale about:

* The flaws in longtermist thinking

* Selections from his new book, The Revenge of Reason

* Metaphysics

* What philosophy has to say about reason and AI

Enjoy—and let me know what you think!

Pete is an independent philosopher based in Newcastle. Dr. Wolfendale got both his undergraduate degree and his Ph.D in Philosophy at the University of Warwick. His Ph.D  thesis offered a re-examination of the Heideggerian Seinsfrage, arguing that Heideggerian scholarship has failed to fully do jus...

Episode 133

I spoke with Peter Lee about:

* His early work on compiler generation, metacircularity, and type theory

* Paradoxical problems

* GPT-4s impact, Microsoft’s “Sparks of AGI” paper, and responses and criticism

Enjoy—and let me know what you think!

Peter is President of Microsoft Research. He leads Microsoft Research and incubates new research-powered products and lines of business in areas such as artificial intelligence, computing foundations, health, and life sciences. Before joining Microsoft in 2010, he was at DARPA, where he established a new technology office that created...

Episode 132

I spoke with Manuel and Lenore Blum about:

* Their early influences and mentors

* The Conscious Turing Machine and what theoretical computer science can tell us about consciousness

Enjoy—and let me know what you think!

Manuel is a pioneer in the field of theoretical computer science and the winner of the 1995 Turing Award in recognition of his contributions to the foundations of computational complexity theory and its applications to cryptography and program checking, a mathematical approach to writing programs that check their work. He worked as a professor of...

Episode 131

I spoke with Professor Kevin Dorst about:

* Subjective Bayesianism and epistemology foundations

* What happens when you’re uncertain about your evidence

* Why it’s rational for people to polarize on political matters

Enjoy—and let me know what you think!

Kevin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. He works at the border between philosophy and social science, focusing on rationality.

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Episode 130

I spoke with David Pfau about:

* Spectral learning and ML

* Learning to disentangle manifolds and (projective) representation theory

* Deep learning for computational quantum mechanics

* Picking and pursuing research problems and directions

David’s work is really (times k for some very large value of k) interesting—I’ve been inspired to descend a number of rabbit holes because of it.

(if you listen to this episode, you might become as cool as this guy)

While I’m at it — I’m still hovering arou...

Episode 129

I spoke with Dan Hart and Michelle Michael about:

* Developing NSWEduChat, an AI-powered chatbot designed and delivered by the NSW Department of Education for students and teachers.

* The challenges in effectively teaching students as technology develops

* Understanding and defining the importance of the classroom

Enjoy—and let me know what you think!

Dan Hart is Head of AI, and Michelle Michael is Director of Educational Support and Rural Initiatives at the New South Wales (NSW) Department of Education.

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