AI is the future. Hundreds of companies are working on programs that understand your questions and give you answers, or rate your CV and offer you a job, or diagnose your X-rays and offer you treatment, or analyse the market and offer you investment advice, or understand the road and drive your car. What happens when they all join up together and achieve General AI – not just the ability to do some human tasks, but to really think and act like a human? What happens then?
Just what does our future with AI look like? Hollywood seems dead set that AIs will want to kill us. But that's just for a thrilling, 120-minute blockbuster. The tech industry in Silicon Valley is inventing really amazing AI products. But your workplace is going to procure cheap AI programs from a startup in a garage in Croydon.
In this podcast we'll meet some AI specialists who are building bits of the future, some AI sceptics who want to check who benefits from that future, and some comedians whose fresh perspectives on the human condition offer insight into how we can all adapt to a future that is less controlled by us and more controlled by the machines.
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Professor David De Roure (https://eng.ox.ac.uk/people/david-de-roure/) is an expert on using technology to support creativity. A jazz musician, he wants to create an AI that can help you to create a musical soundtrack for your life. Computers and AI have been used as a way to generate "experimental" music for decades, but recently their musical proficiency has become more mainstream with even an AI equivalent of the Eurovision Song Contest! (https://www.aisongcontest.com/) and AI tribute versions of Nirvana (https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/nirvana-kurt-cobain-ai-song-1146444/). AI's are even being trained to "get" the emotional contrent of songs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doUTqWUAuDw), something which Spotify wants to take advantage of (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-55839655).
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4 Jan 2022
AI DIY Episode 4 Support Bot
Olga Koch (https://www.rocknrolga.com/) is a TV comedian who makes shows about technology and who studies the regulation of the Internet. She wants to make an AI that will reassure you about your worst behaviour, and always present your achievements in the best possible light. Although there isn't an AI product that has your back in that way yet, there are a number of emotional support bots that are being tried out. Moflin (https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/363186) is an AI for emotional support - a kind of furry pet robot tamagochi that looks like a tribble. But before it can support you, you'll have to support it on Indiegogo! (https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/moflin-an-ai-pet-with-emotional-capabilities#/) If you like your robots to be cute then you can go to Japan and buy a Lovot (https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/10/18176002/lovot-groovex-robot-emotional-attachment-ces-2019) companion robot, aka cuddlebot, that looks like a tellytubby and is designed to create an emotional bond with you. The My Special AFLAC Duck (https://aflacchildhoodcancer.org/myduck.cfm) is a social robot that is used to comfort children in hospital.
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28 Dec 2021
AI DIY Episode 3 Roboaudit
Dr Pamela Ugwidike is an expert on the use of AI in justice systems and is particularly interested in how AI and data bias impact criminal justice. She wants to make an AI that can audit other AIs for bias to make sure that all Artificial Intelligence always operates in the interest of humanity. There's currently a huge amount of interest in AI ethics and biases in the research community, and we are discovering many ways in which our
data and our computations can lead to unfairness.
Perhaps the most famous case of AI bias comes from the field of criminal justice. The COMPAS algorithm (used in US courts to predict whether a defendant would go on to reoffend) was twice as likely to incorrectly label black people as reoffenders than white people. While there are lots of advice and programming toolkits aimed at helping human developers to eradicate bias from the AI products that they are building, IBM's Watson OpenScale is the only AI platform that claims to detect and correct biases in its own operation. Although is that just IBM's marketing department being a bit biased?
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14 Dec 2021
AI DIY Episode 2 Social Introduction Bot
Ken Cheng (https://twitter.com/kenchengcomedy) is a comedian, professional poker player and presenter of Game Over, Human (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0001qjj), a BBC Radio 4 program about game players and the AIs that beat them. His choice of AI is a robot that will handle social networking situations for him, introducing him to people at parties and telling anecdotes to make him look good. This is an idea that the event industry is really excited about, with AI Matchmakers (https://www.brella.io/blog/ai-matchmaking-future-of-events) that can advise all the delegates about who they want to be speaking to. If that's too corporate for you, how about a dating coach (https://aimm.online/), or Microsoft's TrueMatch software (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/truematch/) to pick good teams of online gameplayers.
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7 Dec 2021
AI DIY Episode 1 Robot Politician
Professor Age Chapman (https://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/people/ac1n16) is an expert on the data pipeline that companies use to develop AI and Data Science products. Her choice of future AI is a robot politician - but what even is a politician for? It's unsurprising that science fiction is full of robot leaders and politicians — see Isaac Asimov's story "Franchise" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_(short_story)) about how democracy works in a world controlled by an all-powerful computer. However, it may surprise you to know that in real life, most people approve of replacing their politicians by robots (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/27/europeans-want-to-replace-lawmakers-with-ai.html) and that an AI chatbot ran against Vladimir Putin in the Russian general election in 2018 (https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2017/12/07/artificial-intelligence-robot-alisa-nominated-for-russian-president-a59845).
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