Artificial Intelligence and You

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . I am talking with Katja Grace, founder of AI Impacts, a forecasting and risk research project focused on AI safety and governance. She has leveraged her passion and concern about AI risk into a significant role in, for instance, surveying the AI community for its evaluations of risk, which got her named to Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in AI for 2024. She is an expert on technological trajectories, model scaling, and anthropic reasoning. In our conclusion, we talk about predicting superintelligence, Katja’s p(doom), regulation, the Great Filter argument, and Katja’s childhood calculations for dealing with lethal snake encounters. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . One of the great wounds people are experiencing around AI is in creativity. Look at the writers’ and actors’ strikes, for example. I continue talking about this very sensitive subject with Maya Ackerman, author of the new book Creative Machines: AI, Art, and Us, which tackles it head on, full of emotion, vulnerability, and poetry. Maya is the CEO and co-founder of Wave AI, and professor of Computer Science at Santa Clara University. She completed postdoctoral fellowships at Caltech and UC San Diego, and has authored over 50 peer-reviewed publications. She was named a Woman of Influence by the Silicon Valley Business Journal and her work has been featured in Forbes, NPR, Fortune, and NBC News. She is also a singer, pianist, and songwriter. We talk about experiments in machine creativity, the distinction between creative processes and creative products and the role of the observer in the creative experience, how bias against AI shows up, and how AI that’s constructed around compassion and ethical stewardship could support deeper human flourishing in the next few years. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . The fear, uncertainty, and doubt around the future of work has reached epidemic proportions. We'll attempt to shed some light and provide some relief with data, questions, and informed speculation on the topic. How is the generation of content going to evolve, and what's awaiting us in robotics? Who will make the decisions about the future workplace, and what will happen to creatives in marketing and other fields? All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . After last week’s exploration of AI in secondary education it’s time to look at how it’s landing in the universities, and so I am talking with José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson, authors of the brand new book Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning. José leads the Bowen Innovation Group, consulting on innovation in higher education and was the 11th president of Goucher College. He has held leadership roles at Stanford, the University of Southampton, Georgetown, Miami University, and Southern Methodist University, and his influential book Teaching Naked reshaped conversations about technology and pedagogy. He edited the Cambridge Companion to Conducting, and is an international jazz pianist. C. Edward Watson - Eddie on our show - is Vice President for Digital Innovation at the American Association of Colleges and Universities and is the Founding Director of their Institute on AI, Pedagogy, and the Curriculum. He directed the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Georgia, and is a Fellow of the Louise McBee Institute of Higher Education. We talk about how students and teachers are reacting to AI, threats to jobs – particularly teaching jobs – and changes to how we work, what really matters in the practice of teaching in an AI world, cheating, changes to relationships between teachers and students and the importance of caring. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . What’s going on with getting AI education into America’s classrooms? We’re going to find out from Jeff Riley, former Commissioner of Education for the state of Massachusetts and founder of a new organization – Day of AI, started by MIT’s Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education institute. And they are mounting a campaign called Responsible AI for America’s Youth, which is now running across all 50 states and will run an event called America’s Youth AI Festival in July 2026 in Boston. Jeff has got master’s degrees from Johns Hopkins and Harvard. He was a Boston school principal and as commissioner, successfully navigated Massachusetts schools through Covid and other crises. We talk about what the campaign is doing and how teachers are responding to it, risks of AI and social media to kids, what to do about cheating and AI detectors, and much more! All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.