New Podcast: “Humans vs. Machines with Gary Marcus”

 Ever since the development of the first IBM mainframe computer, there has been a steady stream of panic about machines taking over. Of course, books, TV, and film have built a cottage industry based on the threat of your "smart" toaster taking over your home and using your burnt bread against you. But the latest catalyst for that anguish is the recent distribution of AI systems to do smart searches, write articles, and record audiobooks. 

Soon, AI systems will be capable of writing articles like this one. Scratch that. My wifi thermostat already writes most of these articles. I just lightly edit.

That's why it's significant that Aventine Research Institute and Audacy’s Pineapple Street Studios announced the launch of a new eight-part audio series, Humans vs. Machines with Gary Marcus, hosted by leading AI expert, cognitive scientist, 2023 TED speaker, and best-selling author, Gary Marcus. 

The series will serve as the fourth season of “The World as You’ll Know It,” demystifying AI's past, present and future and bringing to life some of the technology’s most significant breakthroughs and failures. The documentary and narrative-style podcast debuted on Tuesday, April 25, and is available on the Audacy app and wherever podcast fans get their podcasts. 

Follow the series HERE.

Through powerful stories, interviews, first-person accounts, and Marcus’s own perspective, Humans vs. Machines with Gary Marcus provides a framework for how individuals, governments, and businesses can think about AI, the questions we need to ask about it as a society, and the steps we should take to make AI a benefit that can be broadly shared.

For all the progress in artificial intelligence over the last 70 years, we still don’t know how to build AI we can trust. Examining the technology behind self-driving cars, medical diagnoses, and language models like ChatGPT, he argues that the potential benefits of AI are too great to be ignored, but so are the risks. The subject may be daunting, but Marcus and the producers of Humans vs. Machines with Gary Marcus designed the series to engage even casual listeners. AI, Marcus argues, is too important to be left to technology companies alone.

“We’re living through a defining moment in the history and innovation of artificial intelligence. While we keep hearing about the promises of AI and machine learning, the truth is it’s currently on the wrong path, and we need to rethink how we create and use it. Having a holistic understanding of AI and what existing and future developments mean for society is imperative,” says host Gary Marcus. “It’s an honor to partner with Audacy and Aventine to create a podcast that provides a better understanding of what we need as a society to make sure that we get to the right place with AI.”

Throughout the series, Marcus is joined by engineers, scientists, philosophers, and journalists working at the forefront of AI to explain what its capabilities can mean for society. 

Guests include Dr. David Ferrucci, who served as the principal investigator for the IBM Watson/Jeopardy! project; Ken Jennings, Jeopardy! host, author, and former contestant who played against IBM’s Watson; Suchi Saria, CEO & Founder Bayesian Health, Inc. and Endowed Chair & AI Prof, Johns Hopkins; Dr. Isaac Kohane, chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School; Cade Metz, technology reporter at The New York Times; Missy Cummings, a pioneering Navy fighter pilot, systems analyst and a critic of the self-driving car industry and Yejin Choi, a MacArthur “genius” fellowship awardee, who has developed computer models that detect biases against underrepresented groups, among others.

Gary Marcus is a leading voice in artificial intelligence. He is a scientist, best-selling author, and serial entrepreneur (Founder of Robust.AI and Geometric.AI, acquired by Uber). He is well-known for his challenges to contemporary AI, anticipating many of the current limitations decades in advance, and for his research in human language development and cognitive neuroscience.

An Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU, he is the author of five books, including, The Algebraic Mind, Kluge, The Birth of the Mind, and the New York Times Bestseller Guitar Zero. He has often contributed to The New Yorker, Wired, and The New York Times. Gary’s most recent book, Rebooting AI, with Ernest Davis, is one of Forbes’s 7 Must Read Books in AI, and at his recent TED Talk, he called for the formation of an International Agency for AI.

The podcast is separated into two parts, with the first four episodes (part one) premiering April 25 with a weekly rollout and the last four episodes (part two) debuting later this summer. The new season marks the latest addition to the podcast series The World as You’ll Know It, which looks at how current technological and scientific developments will affect the ways in which we live and work in the future. 

This article is written by a human and can be certified as a human creation....

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Photo by Tara Winstead