Artificial Intelligence and You

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . We're continuing to focus on AI in education because it's so pivotal to the future of the human race. What's really going on in classrooms with AI right now? We are learning that from Gerry White, a teacher, technologist, writer, and lifelong learner who has spent two decades at the forefront of education and technology integration. Gerry is the Dean of Academic Technology at ECPI University in Virginia and the founder of MyTutorPlus, an AI-powered tutoring platform designed to personalize education for learners of all ages. From building over 70 apps to creating immersive AR and VR experiences, his work bridges the gap between the humanities and technology. His Substack articles and books unpack the ethical, emotional, and societal consequences of AI. We’re going to talk about how generative AI first showed up in Gerry’s classrooms, the importance of preserving students’ voices, confronting the cheating and plagiarism problems, optimal ways of engaging students’ use of AI, and finding the unique value of humans in the workplace, all in the context of real experiences in real classes. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . Students using AI to cheat on homework - or being inaccurately flagged as cheating - falls under the heading of 'academic integrity,' so I am talking with Alyson King, Professor in Political Science at Ontario Tech University in Canada, and editor of the new book, “Artificial Intelligence, Pedagogy and Academic Integrity,” containing 12 contributors’ thoughts and research on the problem of maintaining academic integrity in a world where AI can complete virtually any school assignment at a passing grade or higher. Alyson earned her PhD in the History of Education at the University of Toronto and currently she engages in research intended to better understand student experiences and academic integrity. In her teaching, she includes topics related to Indigenous experiences and worldviews, such as Residential Schools, and has designed a course about the politics of Indigenous Rights. We’re going to talk about teachers getting to know their students’ voices, AI detectors, and the place of AI in education. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . Students using AI to cheat on homework - or being inaccurately flagged as cheating - falls under the heading of 'academic integrity,' so I am talking with Alyson King, Professor in Political Science at Ontario Tech University in Canada, and editor of the new book, “Artificial Intelligence, Pedagogy and Academic Integrity,” containing 12 contributors’ thoughts and research on the problem of maintaining academic integrity in a world where AI can complete virtually any school assignment at a passing grade or higher. Alyson earned her PhD in the History of Education at the University of Toronto and currently she engages in research intended to better understand student experiences and academic integrity. In her teaching, she includes topics related to Indigenous experiences and worldviews, such as Residential Schools, and has designed a course about the politics of Indigenous Rights. We’re going to talk about plagiarism, AI-proofing assignments, motivating students, threats to critical thinking, and much more. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . We are again focusing on AI in education, because that is really where the rubber meets the road for nearly every issue in AI and where we need to get it right, because that’s where we’re training the generation that will save the world. You could be very pessimistic about that, but you can also be very optimistic about that, and one person who is optimistic is Becky Keene, an educator, author, and speaker focused on innovative teaching and learning, and author of the new book, AI Optimism, about all the good possibilities of AI in education. She specializes in instructional coaching, game-based learning, and integrating AI into education to empower students as creators. We talk about the conflict between fear and hope about AI in education, changing our focus from product to process, how to reshape education to leverage AI, what role school leadership should play, and much more. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . As we use AI more and more as a critical assistant, what might that be doing to our critical thinking? Professor Michael Gerlich has published his research in the paper “AI Tools In Society: Impacts On Cognitive Offloading And The Future Of Critical Thinking” in the journal Societies. He showed that younger participants “exhibited higher dependence on AI tools and lower critical thinking scores compared to older participants.” That’s the sort of result that demands we pay attention at a time when AI is being increasingly used by schools and students. Michael is the Head of Center for Strategic Corporate Foresight and Sustainability at SBS Swiss Business School. His research and publications largely focus on the societal impact of Artificial Intelligence, which has made him in demand as a speaker around the world. He’s also taught at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Cambridge, and other institutions. He’s also been an adviser to the President and the Prime Minister of Kyrgyzstan, the Uzbekistan Cabinet, and Ministers of economic affairs in Azerbaijan. In part 2, we talk about whether or how we can tell that our cognition has been impaired, how the future of work will change with cognitive offloading and what employers need to beware of and leverage. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . As we use AI more and more as a critical assistant, what might that be doing to our critical thinking? Professor Michael Gerlich has published his research in the paper “AI Tools In Society: Impacts On Cognitive Offloading And The Future Of Critical Thinking” in the journal Societies. He showed that younger participants “exhibited higher dependence on AI tools and lower critical thinking scores compared to older participants.” That’s the sort of result that demands we pay attention at a time when AI is being increasingly used by schools and students. Michael is the Head of Center for Strategic Corporate Foresight and Sustainability at SBS Swiss Business School. His research and publications largely focus on the societal impact of Artificial Intelligence, which has made him in demand as a speaker around the world. He’s also taught at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Cambridge, and other institutions. He’s also been an adviser to the President and the Prime Minister of Kyrgyzstan, the Uzbekistan Cabinet, and Ministers of economic affairs in Azerbaijan. We talk about “cognitive offloading” and the use of GenAI. Why is it different from using calculators, which were widely forecast to cause math skills to atrophy and were banned from schools, and we since learned better. Michael will look at how AI like the big agents that might come with workplace IT systems help or hinder in knowledge work, and consequences for on-the-job training. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . "The book seems to be more timely than originally anticipated." I'm talking with Carl Benedikt Frey about his new book, How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations, and its exploration of the political and economic effects of policies like tariffs and university defunding comes at a very critical time. AI is projected to have enormous economic and social impacts that call for the biggest of big picture thinking, and Frey is the co-author of the 2013 study The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerization, which has received over 12,000 citations. He is Associate Professor of AI and Work at the Oxford Internet Institute and Director and Founder of the Future of Work Programme at the Oxford Martin School, both at the University of Oxford. His 2019 book, The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation, was selected as a Financial Times Best Book of the Year and awarded Princeton University’s Richard A. Lester Prize. In the conclusion, we talk about the links between innovation and industry productivity, why AI hasn’t yet delivered broad gains, automation’s uneven effects on workers, the role of antitrust in sustaining competition, and the need for institutions like Oxford to adapt. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . "The book seems to be more timely than originally anticipated." I'm talking with Carl Benedikt Frey about his new book, How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations, and its exploration of the political and economic effects of policies like tariffs and university defunding comes at a very critical time. AI is projected to have enormous economic and social impacts that call for the biggest of big picture thinking, and Frey is the co-author of the 2013 study The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerization, which has received over 12,000 citations. He is Associate Professor of AI and Work at the Oxford Internet Institute and Director and Founder of the Future of Work Programme at the Oxford Martin School, both at the University of Oxford. His 2019 book, The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation, was selected as a Financial Times Best Book of the Year and awarded Princeton University’s Richard A. Lester Prize. We talk about whether progress is inevitable, how growth depends on the interplay of technology and institutions, the link between productivity and innovation, the importance of institutional flexibility and decentralized funding, the effects of tariffs, the risks of China’s increasingly centralized model, and why the US and China are both triggering declining dynamism in each other. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . I'm talking with Megan Peters, who researches thinking about thinking, or metacognition. She is an Associate Professor in the UC Irvine Department of Cognitive Sciences, studying how the brain represents and uses uncertainty, focusing on how these abilities support metacognitive evaluations of the quality of our decisions. She’s a Fellow in the UCI Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, the UCI Center for Theoretical Behavioral Sciences, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Brain Mind & Consciousness program. She’s also President and Co-founder of Neuromatch, an educational platform serving over 30,000 students in over 120 countries across computational neurosciences, deep learning, computational climate science, and neuroAI. In our conclusion, we talk about Turing Tests, measuring the brain, the Haunted Mansion, some cool experiments on brains, and… cats. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . Have you ever thought about thinking? That’s called metacognition, and Megan Peters thinks about that, a lot. She is an Associate Professor in the UC Irvine Department of Cognitive Sciences, researching how the brain represents and uses uncertainty, focusing on how these abilities support metacognitive evaluations of the quality of our decisions. She’s a Fellow in the UCI Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, the UCI Center for Theoretical Behavioral Sciences, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Brain Mind & Consciousness program. She’s also President and Co-founder of Neuromatch, an educational platform serving over 30,000 students in over 120 countries across computational neurosciences, deep learning, computational climate science, and neuroAI. We get really meta here: talking about thinking about thinking, how we build models of the world, how language shapes our thinking, whether AI is doing metacognition in its chains of thought, statistical learning in AIs and humans, consciousness in humans and animals and AIs, and theories of consciousness. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . I am talking with neuroscientist Christof Koch, and as he says, "How is it that we, a piece of furniture of the universe like a rock or a star or a tree, can love or hate or see or hear?" What, in other words, makes us conscious, and what does that mean? He is known for his work exploring the substrate of consciousness in humans, animals, and machines and is the author of more than 350 peer-reviewed publications and five books, the latest of which is Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It. A physicist and neurobiologist, he was for more than a quarter of a century a professor of biology and engineering at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. In 2011, he became the Chief Scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle and in 2015, its president; now a Meritorious Investigator. He is also the Chief Scientist of the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation in Santa Monica, seeking to understand consciousness, its place in nature, and how this knowledge can benefit all of humanity. In part 2, we talk about a theory of consciousness that Christof is a primary researcher of: Integrated Information Theory, and tools for detecting and measuring consciousness, the magic number φ, the possibility of consciousness transfer, philosophical zombies, and neural correlates of consciousness. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . As my guest today says, "How is it that we, a piece of furniture of the universe like a rock or a star or a tree, can love or hate or see or hear?" What, in other words, makes us conscious, and what does that mean? He is the cognitive scientist Christof Koch, known for his work exploring the substrate of consciousness in humans, animals, and machines. He is the author of more than 350 peer-reviewed publications and five books, the latest of which is Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It. A physicist and neurobiologist, he was for more than a quarter of a century a professor of biology and engineering at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. In 2011, he became the Chief Scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle and in 2015, its president; now a Meritorious Investigator. He is also the Chief Scientist of the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation in Santa Monica, seeking to understand consciousness, its place in nature, and how this knowledge can benefit all of humanity. Why is an AI show interested in consciousness? Because the questions constantly arise, is AI conscious? How will we know when it is? How can or should we make it conscious? And if we can’t answer those questions for human beings, how will we answer them for anything else? We talk about the relationships between existence, identity, quantum mechanics, language, and consciousness, and cosmic consciousness, how conscious parts of your body might be, connecting brains to each other, including an example that’s already happened, and… opera. It is possibly literally mind blowing. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . "We are in the privileged - or unfortunate - situation of being the last generation of humans to be parenting AIs. All the future generations of AIs are going to be parented mainly by AIs. And so even more than with our human children and grandchildren, we have one shot at raising this next generation correctly." I am talking with De Kai, a pioneering professor of AI who built the web’s first global online language translator that spawned Google Translate and Microsoft Bing Translator, and author of new book, Raising AI: An Essential Guide to Parenting Our Future. De Kai was honored by the Association for Computational Linguistics as one of its 17 Founding Fellows and holds joint appointments at HKUST’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering and Division of Arts and Machine Creativity, and at Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute. He is Independent Director of the AI ethics think tank The Future Society and was one of eight inaugural members of Google’s AI ethics council. So he’s helped create some of the most important mechanisms and institutions of the modern AI age. In the conclusion of our interview, we talk about how to parent AI and what that means, responsibilities of the AI companies, a kind of parent-teacher association for AI and how to get involved, and our responsibilities to the next generation. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . As AI becomes more and more powerful, what is our responsibility, collectively? I am joined by De Kai, a pioneering professor of AI who built the web’s first global online language translator that spawned Google Translate and Microsoft Bing Translator. And he has answered those questions with his new book, Raising AI: An Essential Guide to Parenting Our Future. De Kai was honored by the Association for Computational Linguistics as one of its 17 Founding Fellows and holds joint appointments at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering and Division of Arts and Machine Creativity, and at Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute. He is Independent Director of the AI ethics think tank The Future Society and was one of eight inaugural members of Google’s AI ethics council. So he’s helped create some of the most important mechanisms and institutions of the modern AI age. We talk about why we should parent AI, the existential issues that drove him to write the book, seeing AI as neuro-atypical, and the architecture and features of AI that are important to consider in how we relate to it. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . Welcome to a joint episode with the London Futurists podcast, hosted by David Wood and Calum Chace, who have both been individual guests on this show in the past. David is chair of the London Futurists and named by T3 as one of the 100 most influential people in technology. He is author of the books, “The Singularity Principles: Anticipating and managing cataclysmically disruptive technologies” and more recently, “The Death of Death.” Calum is the author of "Surviving AI: The promise and peril of artificial intelligence," and "The Economic Singularity: Artificial intelligence and the death of capitalism." He was recently ranked sixth in a list of the world’s top futurist professionals by Global Gurus TOP30. Together, David and Calum are key players at a new company called Conscium, which describes itself as “the world’s first applied AI consciousness research organisation.” I follow every episode of the London Futurists podcast and I recommend you do too. There’s a link to it in the show notes and transcript. And if you can attend any of the London Futurists meetings, they are very useful and thought-provoking, and many of them are online and free. We are all talking together today about AI agents, AI safety and security, its effects on social cohesion and communication, and decentralization of control. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . It’s more important than ever to define just what we mean by words like intelligence, consciousness, and thinking. Here to help us is Kate Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA and the James B. Duke Professor Emerita from Duke University. Her research focuses on the relations of literature, science and technology, and her books include Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious, and How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. She has fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim, a Rockefeller Residential Fellowship at Bellagio, and two University of California Presidential Research Fellowships, and she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. We are focusing on her new book, Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts, where she lays out a new theory of mind—what she calls an integrated cognitive framework—that includes the meaning-making practices of lifeforms from bacteria to plants, animals, humans, and some forms of artificial intelligence. In part 2, we talk about where meaning resides, for instance in poetry and literature, and how students’ attention span has changed and shortened as a result of multitasking or multiple information streams and how educational models need to change, how our cognitive symbiosis with AI might evolve, and markers of whether AI has consciousness, sentience, or deserves any individual rights. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . It’s more important than ever to define just what we mean by words like intelligence, consciousness, and thinking. Here to help us is Kate Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. Her research focuses on the relations of literature, science and technology, and a new theory of mind—what she calls an integrated cognitive framework (ICF)—that includes the meaning-making practices of lifeforms from bacteria to plants, animals, humans, and some forms of artificial intelligence. That’s the topic of her new book, Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts. A symbiont is an organism living in symbiosis with another, with a closely-coupled mutual relationship between them. Kate’s other books include Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious, and How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. She has many fellowships, including two University of California Presidential Research Fellowships, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. We talk about the relationship between cognition and consciousness, and between cognition and computation; our dependency and codependency on technology; concepts like anthropocentrism and technosymbiosis, which Kate unpacks in the service of laying out a really novel way of thinking about thinking; and whether AI is thinking, or feeling. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . We get at this AI thing from many different angles: it changes us in so many ways that we're not going to understand it through just a technical discussion. So today we look at what it means to be human in the AI age through the eyes of Dagan Shani, an independent filmmaker who has focused on the risks associated with AI through movies that evoke our emotions. His documentary Don't Look Up - The Documentary: The Case for AI as an Existential Threat was described by Max Tegmark as “the most important film of the year.” Shani’s short documentary from 2024, Moloch - AI and the Deadly Force Driving Us to the Brink, and his latest film, Obsolete - Human Work in the Age of AI, both raise pressing questions about the rapid advancement of AI and its far-reaching implications. In part 2, we talk about Universal Basic Income, more about Moloch, and the Studio Ghibli incident and the future of AI-generated visual media. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . We get at this AI thing from many different angles: it changes us in so many ways that we're not going to understand it through just a technical discussion. So today we look at what it means to be human in the AI age through the eyes of Dagan Shani, an independent filmmaker who has focused on the risks associated with AI through movies that evoke our emotions. His documentary Don't Look Up - The Documentary: The Case for AI as an Existential Threat was described by Max Tegmark as “the most important film of the year.” Shani’s latest film, Obsolete - Human Work in the Age of AI, raises pressing questions about the rapid advancement of AI. We talk about Moloch, which is the legendary personification of competition that drives us to be our worst selves, and the subject of Shani’s short documentary from 2024, Moloch - AI and the Deadly Force Driving Us to the Brink. We also talk about game theory, AI hype, impact on jobs, and AI in movie making. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . How do you deal personally, and organizationally, with exponential change? That’s the subject of a new book, Super Shifts: Transforming How We Live, Learn, And Work In The Age Of Intelligence, and both of its authors are here. Dr. Ja-Naé Duane is a behavioral scientist who has worked with companies such as PWC, Saudi Aramco, AIG, and Deloitte. She is a member of the Loomis Council at the Stimson Center, collaborator with the National Institute of Health, and holds appointments at Brown University and MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research. Steve Fisher co-founded the Futures Practice at McKinsey & Company and is the Managing Partner of the consultancy Revolution Factory. At FTI Consulting, he led the adoption of Generative AI for business model transformation, and is Chief Futurist at the Human Frontier Institute. Together, they have previously authored the bestseller The Startup Equation. In the conclusion of the interview, we’re going to talk about Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, AI’s future enhancements to our lives, the different new species of humans that will emerge, and how the educational system needs to evolve. Steve and Ja-Naé have extended a special offer to the listeners of this show, to get two chapters of their book free via this link. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.