What The Bot with Reuben Adams

David Deutsch is a phenomenal thinker on AI, Physics and Philosophy. But his views on AI risk puzzled me. So I sat down with him to discuss in more detail why he believes AGIs will pose no greater risk than humans. David Deutsch is author of The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity. Both are phenomenal works and thoroughly engrossing. I can't recommend reading them enough. Timestamp...

AI is jagged - superhuman at some things, terrible at others. This is why talk of "AGI" is so misleading. Focusing only on failures misses 90% of the picture, and could leave you unprepared for AI progress. Jaggedness The original jaggedness diagram: https://substack.com/@tomaspueyo/note/c-182052822 The AI Village Homepage: https://theaidigest.org/villageLatest on X: https://x.com/aidige...

I thought the Turing Test was between a person and a computer. But Turing’s paper seems to imply it’s between a man and a woman, and then a computer and a woman. So what really is the Turing Test? And is it a good measure of intelligence anyway? Sources Alan Turing: Computing Machinery and Intelligence, 1950   https://phil415.pbworks.com/f/TuringComputing.pdf Gualtiero Piccinini: Turing’s Rules fo...

Suppose an AI “went rogue”. Couldn’t we just switch it off? How would it keep itself running without human help or an army of robots? And why would AI necessarily be evil, rather than kind? I put these questions to Zershaaneh Qureshi, a researcher at 80,000hrs. Her article “Risks from power-seeking AI systems” is *the* best introduction to the debate on whether AI may one day be an extinction leve...

Sam Altman said 2025 is the year of agents. Andrej Karpathy said they’re slop. The AI Village is a team of AIs working together to do real work, like raising money for charity, creating websites to sell merchandise and even organising an in person event. But the project has shown that while AIs can now use computers, they fall over on the simplest tasks. Doing anything requires multiple attempts,...

Kenneth Cukier is Deputy Executive Editor at The Economist and co-author of "Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil." He came on to debate whether creating spiritual machines would be a necessary stepping stone towards AGI, and whether that's even possible. Kenneth argues that while AI excels at rational thinking (logos), it fundamentally lacks the spiritual dim...

The explicit goal of OpenAI, DeepMind and others is to create AGI.This is insanely risky. It keeps me up at night. AIs smarter than us might:🚨Resist shutdown.🚨Resist us changing their goals.🚨Ruthlessly pursue goals, even if they know it’s not what we want or intended. Some people think I’m nuts for believing this. But they often come round once they hear the central arguments. At the core of th...

Do large language models like ChatGPT actually understand what they're saying? Can AI systems have beliefs, desires, or even consciousness? Philosophers Henry Shevlin and Alex Grzankowski debunk the common arguments against LLM minds and explore whether these systems genuinely think. This episode examines popular objections to AI consciousness - from "they're just next token predictor...

LLMs like ChatGPT are incredibly useful for coding. So naturally they can also be useful for hacking. Tony Anscombe explains how his cybersecurity company ESET discovered the first AI powered ransomware, and its unexpected origins.

Different species solve different problems, so how can we say one is smarter than another? To me, it's intuitively obvious that humans are the most intelligent species on the planet. But Professor Peter Bentley from UCL argues we are intelligent in different ways and cannot be ranked.