Advertise on podcast: The CERN Sparks! Podcast - Future Intelligence

Francesca Rossi is an influential global leader in AI research. Daniel Kahneman is one of the greatest living cognitive psychologists. In the final podcast in the series, our guests take Daniel’s revolutionary “fast and slow” systems of thought as inspiration for rewriting AI, and debate the nature of thought itself. “I really find it difficult to imagine why there should be anything at which humans are essential in the domain of intelligence,” says Kahneman. Is there anything that humans can do that AI cannot in principle do? To find out more, join hosts Mark Rayner and Abha Eli Phoboo as they speak with Anima and John on the subject of Creative AI. Daniel Kahneman is a world-renowned cognitive psychologist and winner of the 2002 Nobel prize in Economics. Francesca Rossi is Global Ethics Leader at IBM and President-Elect of AAAI.

“We always had privacy violation, we had people being blamed falsely for crimes they didn’t do, we had mis-diagnostics, we also had false news, but what AI has done is amplify all this, and make it bigger,” says Google’s Nyalleng Moorosi. In Episode 5, she and philosopher Matthew Liao debate the delicate balance between personal moral agency, human rights and corporate responsibility in the brave new world of artificial intelligence. We need to understand more about these principles, not just to list them, says Liao, because then there’s a worry that we’re just doing ethics washing — they sound good but they don’t have any bite. To find out more, join hosts Mark Rayner and Abha Eli Phoboo as they speak with Anima and John on the subject of Creative AI. Nyalleng Moorosi is a research software engineer at Google working on ethics and democratising AI. S. Matthew Liao is a philosopher and bioethicist.

Particle physics is at a moment of truth. The discovery in 2012 of the Higgs boson promises to reveal a rich new structure for the vacuum and rewrite the history of the early universe, but a long list of fundamental questions remains, and physicists are faced with an awesome data flow from the Large Hadron Collider. In Episode 4, CERN’s Maurizio Pierini and Michael Doser explore using “unsupervised learning” to reveal nature’s mysteries. I’m really super excited about the next LHC run, says Pierini, because this is when we’re going to try these things for real.  To find out more, join hosts Mark Rayner and Abha Eli Phoboo as they speak with Anima and John on the subject of Creative AI. Maurizio Pierini is an innovative young experimental physicist implementing AI techniques at the Large Hadron Collider. Michael Doser is a seasoned experimental physicist at CERN’s antimatter factory.

We can dream, we can hallucinate, we can create — so how do we build those capabilities into AI? Deep-learning expert Anima Anandkumar and distinguished theoretical physicist John Ellis discuss the potential for artificial intelligence to one day collaborate with us in attacking the biggest unanswered questions in physics — questions which have outwitted humans for years. In a conversation ranging from the quantum nature of subatomic reality to the distributed intelligence of the octopus, our guests explore how AI might one day tackle questions which are conceptually boundless and infinite. “This would be truly stealing the theoretical physicists’ lunch,” says Ellis. To find out more, join hosts Mark Rayner and Abha Eli Phoboo as they speak with Anima and John on the subject of Creative AI. Anima Anandkumar is a leading machine-learning researcher whose career spans academia and industry. John Ellis is one of the world’s most respected theoretical physicists.

Episode 2 collides two rockstars of the world of artificial intelligence to reimagine the field for the next generation. Is consciousness quantum or just me talking to myself? Could quantum computing unlock a step change in artificial intelligence? Our guests also get down to earth on the need for AI to tackle real-world data-poor problems from hiring bias to diagnosing manic episodes in bipolar sufferers. There is a recurring flaw in applied artificial intelligence, argues Ming. Machine learning is not a Deus ex machina for your company’s problems: expertise is queen, and innovation by gender and ethnic minorities is problematically undervalued. To find out more, join hosts Mark Rayner and Abha Eli Phoboo as they speak with Maria and Vivienne on the subject of Quantum AI.  Vivienne Ming is a theoretical neuroscientist and serial AI entrepreneur. Maria Spiropulu is an influential experimental particle physicist who is leading the way on the use of quantum technologies in AI.

Do we need to understand the brain to make progress in artificial intelligence? In the first podcast in the series, Stuart Russell and Tomaso Poggio contrast “deep learning” with our own organic neural networks. In an age of great demonstrations by the likes of Deep Mind and OpenAI, our guests make the case for focusing on controlled experimentation, and question the wisdom of using AI in science before it is fully understood. The mystery of intelligence, says Poggio, is the greatest problem in science today — if we solve it, we solve all other problems too. To find out more, join hosts Mark Rayner and Abha Eli Phoboo as they speak with Stuart and Tomaso on the subject of Brainy AI. Stuart Russell is a renowned expert in machine learning, and a leading thinker on AI safety. Tomaso Poggio is one of the founders of computational neuroscience. His students have made a profound impact on machine learning.

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