Dan Riskin - September 29, 2023

"Bat biologist" Dan Riskin joins David to talk about science. The two ponder what it means to produce good work – last week's work was always better, right? Dan discusses what happens when he gets asked science questions on TV that he isn’t really qualified to answer. Dan tells David about a bizarre sea creature spotted off the coast of Japan. Prompted by a novel way to get artificial intelligence to produce better work, the two discuss deep questions about how AI will transform society. How in the future you may not be able to tell the difference between a very good AI and a human. Using the emergent property of consciousness being a product of enough neurons (ie, the brain): David uses an analogy to ask whether the appearance of "thinking" means actual thinking is an emergent property of AI. Dan mentions how AI has been used to solve a class of previously unsolved biology problems, while David wonders if AI will be used to solve the problem of hooking a computer up to the brain. Finally, the discussion gets a bit lighter as Dan describes what jamias vu is (as opposed to déjà vu). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices