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...

“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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Teaser