Stay Human, from the Artificiality Institute

First: - Apologies for the audio! We had a production error… What’s new: - DeepSeek has created breakthroughs in both: How AI systems are trained (making it much more affordable) and how they run in real-world use (making them faster and more efficient) Details - FP8 Training: Working With Less Precise Numbers - Traditional AI training requires extremely precise numbers - DeepSeek found you can us...

We’re excited to welcome writers and directors Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck to the podcast. Their debut film, ‘The Cleaners,’ about the shadow industry of digital censorship premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2018 and has since won numerous international awards and been screened at more than 70 international film festivals. We invited Hans and Moritz to the podcast to talk about their...

Briefing: How AI Affects Critical Thinking and Cognitive Offloading What This Paper Highlights - The study explores the growing reliance on AI tools and its effects on critical thinking, specifically through cognitive offloading—delegating mental tasks to AI systems. - Key finding: Frequent AI tool use is strongly associated with reduced critical thinking abilities, especially among younger users,...

We’re excited to welcome Craig Wheeler to the podcast. Craig is an astrophysicist and Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Over his career, he has made significant contributions to our understanding of supernovae, black holes, and the nature of the universe itself. Craig’s new book,  The Path to Singularity: How Technology Will Challenge the Future of Humanity , offers an exploration of...

Science Briefing: What AI Agents Tell Us About the Future of Human Experience * What These Papers Highlight - AI agents are improving but far from capable of replacing human tasks. Even the best models fail at simple things humans find intuitive, like handling social interactions or navigating pop-ups. - One paper benchmarks agent performance in workplace-like tasks, showing just 24% success on ev...

We’re excited to welcome Doyne Farmer to the podcast. Doyne is a pioneering complexity scientist and a leading thinker on economic systems, technological change, and the future of society. Doyne is a Professor of Complex Systems at the University of Oxford, an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and Chief Scientist at Macrocosm. Doyne’s work spans an extraordinary range of topics, from a...

We're excited to welcome Jamie Boyle to the podcast. Jamie is a law professor and author of the thought-provoking book The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood. In The Line, Jamie challenges our assumptions about personhood and humanity, arguing that these boundaries are more fluid than traditionally believed. He explores diverse contexts like animal rights, corporate personhood, and AI developme...

We're excited to welcome to the podcast Shannon Vallor, professor of ethics and technology at the University of Edinburgh, and the author of  The AI Mirror . In her book, Shannon invites us to rethink AI—not as a futuristic force propelling us forward, but as a reflection of our past, capturing both our human triumphs and flaws in ways that shape our present reality. In  The AI Mirror , Shannon us...

We're excited to welcome to the podcast Matt Beane , Assistant Professor at UC Santa Barbara and the author of the book "The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines." Matt’s research investigates how AI is changing the traditional apprenticeship model, creating a tension between short-term performance gains and long-term skill development. His work has particularly...

We're excited to welcome to the podcast Emily M. Bender, professor of computational linguistics at the University of Washington. As our listeners know, we enjoy tapping expertise in fields adjacent to the intersection of humans and AI. We find Emily’s expertise in linguistics to be particularly important when understanding the capabilities and limitations of large language models—and that’s why we...

We're excited to welcome to the podcast John Havens, a multifaceted thinker at the intersection of technology, ethics, and sustainability. John's journey has taken him from professional acting to becoming a thought leader in AI ethics and human wellbeing. In his 2016 book, "Heartificial Intelligence: Embracing Our Humanity to Maximize Machines," John presents a thought-provoking examination of hum...

We’re excited to welcome to the podcast Leslie Valiant, a pioneering computer scientist and Turing Award winner renowned for his groundbreaking work in machine learning and computational learning theory. In his seminal 1983 paper, Leslie introduced the concept of Probably Approximately Correct or PAC learning, kick-starting a new era of research into what machines can learn. Now, in his latest boo...

We’re excited to welcome to the podcast Jonathan Feinstein , professor at the Yale School of Management and author of Creativity in Large-Scale Contexts: Guiding Creative Engagement and Exploration . Our interest in creativity is broader than the context of the creative professions like art, design, and music. We see creativity as the foundation of how we move ahead as a species including our cult...

We’re excited to welcome to the podcast Karaitiana Taiuru. Dr Taiuru is a leading authority and a highly accomplished visionary Māori technology ethicist specialising in Māori rights with AI, Māori Data Sovereignty and Governance with emerging digital technologies and biological sciences. Karaitiana has been a champion for Māori cultural and intellectual property rights in the digital space since...

We’re excited to welcome to the podcast Omri Allouche, the VP of Research at Gong, an AI-driven revenue intelligence platform for B2B sales teams. Omri has had a fascinating career journey with a PhD in computational ecology before moving into the world of AI startups. At Gong, Omri leads research into how AI and machine learning can transform the way sales teams operate. In our conversation today...

We’re excited to welcome to the podcast Susannah Fox , a renowned researcher who has spent over 20 years studying how patients and caregivers use the internet to gather information and support each other. Susannah has collected countless stories from the frontlines of healthcare and has keen insights into how patients are stepping into their power to drive change. Susannah recently published a boo...

We’re excited to welcome to the podcast  Dr. Angel Acosta , an expert on healing-centered education and leadership. Angel runs the  Acosta Institute  which helps communities process trauma and build environments for people to thrive. He also facilitates leadership programs at the  Garrison Institute  that support the next generation of contemplative leaders. With his background in social sciences,...

We're excited to welcome Doug Belshaw to the show today. Doug is a founding member of the We Are Open Co-op which helps organizations with sensemaking and digital transformation. Doug coined the term "serendipity surface" to describe cultivating an attitude of curiosity and increasing the chance encounters we have by putting ourselves out there. We adopted the term quite some time ag...

We’re excited to welcome Richard Kerris, Vice President of Developer Relations and GM of Media & Entertainment at NVIDIA, to the show today. Richard has had an extensive career working with creators and developers across film, music, gaming, and more. He offers valuable insights into how AI and machine learning are transforming creative tools and workflows. In particular, Richard shares his pe...

We're excited to welcome  Tyler Marghetis , Assistant Professor of Cognitive & Information Sciences at the University of California, Merced, to the show today. Tyler studies what he calls the "lulls and leaps" or "ruts and ruptures" of human imagination and experience. He's fascinated by how we as humans can get stuck in certain patterns of thinking and acting, but...

Why is scientific progress slowing down? That's a question that's been on the minds of many. But before we dive into that, let's ponder this—how do we even know that scientific progress is decelerating? And in an era where machines are capable of understanding complexities that sometimes surpass human cognition, how should we approach the future of knowledge? Joining us in this explora...

Few understand how to anticipate major technology shifts in the enterprise better than today's guest,  Ed Sim . Ed is a pioneer in the world of venture capital, specifically focusing on enterprise software and infrastructure since 1996. He founded  Boldstart  in 2010 to invest at the earliest stages of enterprise software companies, growing the firm from $1M to around $375M today. So where doe...

One of our research obsessions is Edge AI through which we study opportunities to build and deploy AI on a computing device at the edge of a network. The premise is that AI in the cloud benefits from scale but is challenged by cost and privacy and Edge AI solves many of these challenges by eliminating cloud computing costs and keeping data within secure environments. Given this interest, we were e...

One of our long-time subscribers recently said to us: “What I love about you is that you’re regularly talking about things three years ahead of everyone else.” That inspired us to look back through our catalog of conversations to see which ones we think are most relevant now. Today, we're revisiting one of our most thought-provoking episodes, originally recorded in April 2022, featuring Barbar...

In this episode, we speak with cognitive neuroscientist Stephen Fleming about theories of consciousness and how they relate to artificial intelligence. We discuss key concepts like global workspace theory, higher order theories, computational functionalism, and how neuroscience research on consciousness in humans can inform our understanding of whether machines may ever achieve consciousness. In p...