Artificial You (with Susan Schneider)

09/19/19 • 38 min

People may not really know what artificial intelligence is but they are convinced that it will either utterly destroy humankind or lead us into a utopian Singularity between man and machine. But, as philosopher Susan Schneider reminds us, there’s much we don’t know about artificial intelligence, including the nature of consciousness itself. And consciousness, while it may be hard to identify, entails significant ethical obligations, a point that any fan of the HBO show Westworld will quickly grasp. These kinds of questions have been the object of philosophical debate for millennia and it’s a line of inquiry that we should understand before, and not after, we program the first conscious artificial intelligence.

What does it mean to design a mind? What is the ‘problem of other minds’? Why does the consciousness of AI matter? Can machines be conscious? Do you think Androids are conscious? Would we ever have anything like a Westworld with true violence? How much do you replace and you are still you?

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Previous Episode

Crypto History

Cryptocurrency is, ultimately, science fiction. That isn’t an insult. It is science fiction in the sense that decades before you could set up a cold wallet, trade crypto, or hodler Bitcoin, the idea that one day there would exist a vast, distributed digital currency as an alternative to fiat money was a fiction, a thing that existed only in the imaginations of a handful of geeks, programmers, and weirdos. And it is science inasmuch as those same people, through generations of trial and error, actually made that fiction reality.

Professor Finn Brunton joins our show to discuss his latest book, Digital Cash, which is about those innovators—anarchists, socialists, libertarians, and everything in between—and the stories that they told, stories powerful enough to fabricate something worth billions of dollars out of nothing and, possibly, permanently transform the future of money for good or for ill.

How is digital data valuable? How do you find ways that can limit the ways that data can circulate? What does ‘passing current’ mean? What role does trust play in the exchange of currency?

Related Content:

The Future of Banking, written by Pascal Hügli

What’s in Your (Crypto) Wallet?, Building Tomorrow Podcast

Facebook Friends Libra, Building Tomorrow Podcast

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Next Episode

Talking Talk Radio (with Brian Rosenwald)

How did Limbaugh change the radio business? How did the conservative opinion media come to be? Who were the left-wing talk radio hosts while Rush Limbaugh was gaining more and more listeners? Is NPR political advocacy media? What is media bias? Who is Howard Stern and what is “guy talk”? Why are liberal podcasts succeeding in the Trump era?

Conservative talk radio has become an assumed presence in American media and politics, but in this manifestation it is only about three decades old. Historian Brian Rosenwald joins the show to discuss his latest book, Talk Radio’s America: How an Industry Took Over a Political Party that Took Over the United States, which explores the rise of entertainers like Rush Limbaugh from the margins to having incredible influence in national politics. That surprising story has implications for other media, including the future of podcasting, which is allowing previously marginalized voices, from socialists to libertarians, to have greater voice, for good or for ill.