Paul Middlebrooks

Brain Inspired

Science EN ↓ 156 episodes

Neuroscience and artificial intelligence work better together. Brain inspired is a celebration and exploration of the ideas driving our progress to understand intelligence. I interview experts about their work at the interface of neuroscience, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, and more: the symbiosis of these overlapping fields, how they inform each other, where they differ, what the past brought us, and what the future brings. Topics include computational neuroscience, supervised machine learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, deep learning,...

Author

Paul Middlebrooks

Episodes

BI 100.4 Special: What Ideas Are Holding Us Back? 21.03.2021 1:04:26

In the 4th installment of our 100th episode celebration, previous guests responded to the question: What ideas, assumptions, or terms do you think is holding back neuroscience/AI, and why? As usual, the responses are varied and wonderful! Timestamps: 0:00 - Intro 6:41 - Pieter Roelfsema 7:52 - Grace Lindsay 10:23 - Marcel van Gerven 11:38 - Andrew Saxe 14:05 - Jane Wang 16:50 - Thomas Naselaris 18...

BI 100.3 Special: Can We Scale Up to AGI with Current Tech? 17.03.2021 1:08:43

Part 3 in our 100th episode celebration. Previous guests answered the question: Given the continual surprising progress in AI powered by scaling up parameters and using more compute, while using fairly generic architectures (eg. GPT-3): Do you think the current trend of scaling compute can lead to human level AGI? If not, what's missing? It likely won't surprise you that the vast majority answer "...

BI 100.2 Special: What Are the Biggest Challenges and Disagreements? 12.03.2021 1:25:00

In this 2nd special 100th episode installment, many previous guests answer the question: What is currently the most important disagreement or challenge in neuroscience and/or AI, and what do you think the right answer or direction is? The variety of answers is itself revealing, and highlights how many interesting problems there are to work on. Timestamps: 0:00 - Intro 7:10 - Rodrigo Quian Quiroga...

BI 100.1 Special: What Has Improved Your Career or Well-being? 09.03.2021 42:32

Brain Inspired turns 100 (episodes) today! To celebrate, my patreon supporters helped me create a list of questions to ask my previous guests, many of whom contributed by answering any or all of the questions. I've collected all their responses into separate little episodes, one for each question. Starting with a light-hearted (but quite valuable) one, this episode has responses to the question, "...

BI 099 Hakwan Lau and Steve Fleming: Neuro-AI Consciousness 28.02.2021 1:46:35

Hakwan, Steve, and I discuss many issues around the scientific study of consciousness. Steve and Hakwan focus on higher order theories (HOTs) of consciousness, related to metacognition. So we discuss HOTs in particular and their relation to other approaches/theories, the idea of approaching consciousness as a computational problem to be tackled with computational modeling, we talk about the cultur...

BI 098 Brian Christian: The Alignment Problem 18.02.2021 1:32:38

Brian and I discuss a range of topics related to his latest book, The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values. The alignment problem asks how we can build AI that does what we want it to do, as opposed to building AI that will compromise our own values by accomplishing tasks that may be harmful or dangerous to us. Using some of the stories Brain relates in the book, we talk about: The...