The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence

From Skynet to Singularitarian fantasy, AI is back in vogue with much hype and hand-wringing. Mainstream media don’t really know how to talk about it in a way that brings as much light as heat. In fact, even AI researchers have difficulty unpacking concepts like, well, intelligence. Philosophers stand by with critical eyes.

Michael and Max talk about the stickier issues as they try to find footing in a fog of mystery and misinformation. What is cognition? What are morals? Are we recreating conscious minds or just spinning out more sophisticated algorithms? Such questions linger as the industry speeds along, whether or not we have ready answers. Conversations like this help us burn the proverbial candle at both ends.

Artificial Intelligence
Intelligence
Boston Dynamics dog Spot
A Collection of Definitions of Intelligence by Marcus Hutter and Shane Legg
Metalhead episode of Black Mirror with killer robot dogs
Instrumental Rationality
Intelligence Quotient and g factor the psychometric of general human intelligence
Multiple Intelligences and developmental psychologist, Howard Gardner
Technological Singularity
The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil
Exponential growth
Symposium: 'Will Spiritual Robots Replace Humanity?' on April 1st, 2000
Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us by Bill Joy
GPT-3 an AI text generator
Moore’s law
Moore’s Law is not dead and AI is ready to explode
IJ “Jack” Good and the Intelligence Explosion FAQ
AlphaGo project from DeepMind at Google
Lee Sedol
AlphaZero project from Deepmind 
Thomas Thwaites: How I built a toaster - from scratch
I, Pencil by Leonard Read
2001 A Space Odyssey
Terminator
Dystopia
“We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” — Stewart Brand
Stuart J. Russell
The myth of King Midas and the curse of his Golden Touch
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
Paperclip Maximizer
Superintelligence
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom
Descartes Errror and The Feeling of What Happens and the somatic marker hypothesis from Antonio Damasio
The Elephant and the Rider from Jonathan Haidt
Dual process theory — System 1 & System 2
The prefrontal cortex
Reinforcement learning
Skinner box
Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Neocortex
Cortical column
How to Create a Mind by Ray Kurzweil
On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines by Jeff Hawkins
Predictive model of the brain
B. F. Skinner and behaviorism
Noam Chomsky and the cognitive revolution
Neural networks
Machine learning
Writing Successful Reward Functions
Search engine
Image classifier
Homeostasis
Instrumental Convergence, the orthogonality thesis, and the superintelligent will
Externalities
The Chinese Room Argument from John Searle
Oracle AI
Deep Learning
Artificial general intelligence
AI safety conference in Puerto Rico
Tristan Harris
Iason Gabriel on Foundational Philosophical Questions in AI Alignment with Future of Life Institute
Morality, ethics, and meta-ethics
Moral anti-realism
Justice as Fairness by John Rawls
AI Alignment Problem, aka, the Control Problem
Ethics of technology
“We shape our tools and our thereafter our tools shape us”
Daniel Schmactenberger
Laws of Robotics
Friendly AI
Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart J. Russell
Asliomar AI Principles
Complexity
Darwin Machine
Universal Darwinism
The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Brian Christian
Moral Constructivism
Blockchain
Decentralization
Code is Law by Lawrence Lessig
Nudge theory from Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein
Spiral Dynamics
John Nash and game theor
David Gauthier and social contract theory of morality
Ahimsa
The Golden Rule
John Stuart Mill
No-harm principle
Categorical imperative from Immanuel Kant
Negative Utilitarianism
Communicative rationality from Jürgen Habermas
Hippocratic oath
Mutually assured destruction
Warrior monk
Non-attachment
Desire
Biofeedback
Social reality
Network effect
Brain-computer interface
Agent-based models and simulations
Why deep-learning AIs are so easy to fool
Moravec’s Paradox aka “the hard things are easy and the easy things are hard”
Adversarial machine learning
Deduction vs. Induction vs. Abduction
AI Winter & hype-cycle
Common Sense
Creativity
Analogy and Analogical Reasoning
Inference to the best explanation aka abductive inference aka hypothesis generation
Cognitive science
Competitive vs. Complementary Cognitive Artifacts