Artificial Intelligence and You

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .

Who better to answer the call for expertise in human-centered AI design than the man who wrote the book on user interface design? Ben Shneiderman, Emeritus Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Founding Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory and a member of the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, all at the University of Maryland, received six honorary doctorates in human-computer interface design.

His new book, Human-Centered AI, was just published, and in this interview we talk about rationalism and empiricism in human-computer interaction, and metaphors in HCI, including his four metaphors for AI that empowers people.

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/ .

Never mind fantasies about Skynet and Terminators; how to trust AI is a real issue right now, as AI is used in life-impacting decisions like medical diagnoses and loan granting. Kush Varshney has a PhD from MIT and is a distinguished researcher at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York, where he leads the machine learning group in the Foundations of Trustworthy AI department. He is the author of the book Trustworthy Machine Learning. We talk about the whole ecosystem of trustworthiness, finding out where it goes in areas like privacy, anonymization, regulation, compliance, and oversight.

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/ .

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder... and also in AI, when it's used by Chanuki Seresinhe to evaluate the aesthetic appeal of outdoor scenery. Amazing as it sounds, her PhD research trained AI to evaluate the beauty of Great Britain at a one-kilometer resolution, and she's only just getting started. I talk with Chanuki, now head of Data Science at Zoopla, about how she did that and what the applications and ramifications of her work are.

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/ .

Jonathan Rowson is a chess grandmaster who was three times British champion, writing books including "The Moves That Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life." He is now a "philosophical activist" working on "an urgent one hundred year project to improve the relationships between systems, souls, and society" at Perspectiva.

Last week we talked about the impact of computers on the game of chess and the people who play it. This week we make the connection with Jonathan's career as a philosopher and how he intends Perspectiva to make a difference. He'll tell us about their antidebates: "Most of us don’t only disagree with each other, we disagree with ourselves. That’s a very important premise for the antidebate. The main battle is within your own reckoning with a difficult question."

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/ .

Is work heading for utopia? My guest today is John Danaher, senior lecturer in law at the University of Galway and author of the 2019 book, Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World without Work, which is an amazingly broad discourse on the future of work ranging from today’s immediate issues to the different kinds of utopia – or dystopia, depending on your viewpoint – ultimately possible when automation becomes capable of replicating everything that humans do.

John has published over 40 papers on topics including the risks of advanced AI, the meaning of life in the future of work, the ethics of human enhancement, the intersection of law and neuroscience, the utility of brain-based lie detection, and the philosophy of religion. He is co-editor of Robot Sex: Social And Ethical Implications from MIT Press, and his work has appeared in The Guardian, Aeon, and The Philosopher’s Magazine.

In the first part of the interview we talk about how much jobs may be automated and the methodology behind studies of that, the impact of automation on job satisfaction, what’s happening in academia, and much more.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.