Artificiality: Minds Meeting Machines

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 the late 1990s. With the recent eme...

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'll explore Omri's pers...

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 book called "Rebel Health: A Field...

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, curriculum design, and adult education, ...

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 ago and were eager to talk with Doug ...

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 perspective on how these advanced te...

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 then also occasionally experience ra...

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 exploration is Professor James Evans from ...

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 does an experienced investor who has seen ...

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 excited to talk with Rodrigo Liang, ...

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 Barbara Tversky, the author of "Mind...

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 particular, we talk with Steve about...

If you’ve used a large language model, you’ve likely had one or more moments of amazement as the tool immediately responded with impressive content from its massive data cosmos training set. But you’ve likely also had moments of confusion or disillusionment as the tool responded with irrelevant or incorrect responses, displaying a lack of reasoning.

A recent research paper from Meta caught our eye because it proposes a new mechanis...

In this episode, we speak with Julia Rhodes Davis, a Senior Advisor at Data & Society, about her recent report "Advancing Racial Equity Through Technology Policy" published by the AI Now Institute. This comprehensive report provides an in-depth examination of how the technology industry impacts racial inequity and concrete policy recommendations for reform. A critical insight from the report is that advancing racial e...

Grounding her work in the problem of causation, Alicia Juarrero challenges previously held beliefs that only forceful impacts are causes. Constraints, she claims, bring about effects as well, and they enable the emergence of coherence.

Alicia is the author of multiple books, most recently Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence. Helen says in this interview that it feels like this book is from the future. It’s ...

Jai Vipra is a research fellow at the AI Now Institute where she focuses on competition issues in frontier AI models. She recently published the report Computational Power and AI which focuses on compute as a core dependency in building large-scale AI. We found this report to be an important addition to the work covering the generative AI industry because compute is incredibly important but not very well understood. In the report, ...

Wendy Wong is a professor of political science and principal’s research chair at the University of British Columbia where she researches and teaches about the governance of emerging technologies, human rights, and civil society/non-state actors.

In this interview, we talk with Wendy about her new book We, the Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age which is described as “a rallying call for extending human rights beyond our physical ...

Chris Summerfield is a Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Oxford. His work is concerned with understanding how humans learn and make decisions. He is interested in how humans acquire new concepts or patterns in data, and how they use this information to make decisions in novel settings. He's also a research scientist at Deepmind.

Earlier this year, Chris released a book called Natural General Intelligence, How...

Michael Bungay Stanier has an extraordinary talent for distilling the complexity of human relationships into easy to remember and follow frameworks—doing so with just the right amount of Australian humor and plenty of vulnerability. Despite his remarkable success with books like The Coaching Habit, The Advice Trap, and How to Begin, Michael never comes across as one of those gurus who thinks they have all the answers. That mindset ...