May 1, 2022

Ellie Pavlick, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Brown University (🔗) and Research Scientist at Google AI (🔗), joins Michael and Dave in a quick discussion of the remarkable new large AI language models. Topics range from what is and isn't known about the models, and by them, to if or how scared should we...

Apr 2, 2022

Andrew Critch (🔗), a mathematician, AI researcher, organizer and activist (cofounder 🔗, researcher 🔗, cofounder 🔗),  joins Michael and Dave for a fast-moving fifty minutes about existential risks (and opportunities) of AI and other technologies, the limits of intelligence, and the importance of structure at...

Mar 2, 2022

Dave tries to explain why he thinks the best way to understand people and other living things is via computation and programming languages, via codebases and code transmissions. Michael tries to help Dave sound slightly sane.

[Image based on still frame from "We Are...

Feb 7, 2022

Fiery Cushman @fierycushman, professor of psychology at Harvard University 🔗, joins Michael and Dave in a wonderful conversation about morality seen both cognitively and computationally, with topics ranging from trolley problems and fake guns to the wisdom of the ancestors and the hubris of science to what makes...

Jan 1, 2022

Neil Lawrence (home, @lawrennd), the DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge, joins Michael and Dave for a rollicking hour discussing everything from cybernetics to machine learning, from oil rigs to New Jersey shopping malls, from inconsistent scientific reviewing to gods and robots and...