AI DIY Podcast: A Light-Hearted Look at the Future of AI

AI DIY Podcast
A Light-Hearted Look at the Future of AI

Just what does our future with AI look like? Hollywood seems dead set that AIs will want to kill us so that they can make thrilling blockbusters. It's true that the tech industry in Silicon Valley is inventing really amazing AI products, but it's likely that your workplace is going to procure cheaper AI products from a startup in a garage in Croydon.

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?

How will we adapt to AIs when they become part of our world? And how will they adapt to us? We have trained them to make decisions like humans, but can they treat us with humanity?

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.

Presenters

Leslie Carr became a professor in 2013 and started standup in 2017. As a Professor of Web Science his day job is to teach students about the online world, programming and AI. In the evening he is a confessional storytelling comedian with a warm and engaging stage presence, performing standup regularly in London and at comedy venues around the South Coast.

Ruby Carr started standup in April 2017. She is an insufferably delightful, high energy, storytelling comedian and a natural MC. She came to comedy from a background in theatre performing, directing and writing, and was a Finalist for Amused Moose New Act of the Year 2019, a Semifinalist for Jason Manford New Act of the Year 2019 and One to Watch for Funny Women 2021

Episodes

Episode 1: Robot Politician: Professor Age Chapman 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" 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 and that an AI chatbot ran against Vladimir Putin in the Russian general election in 2018.
Episode 2: Social Introduction Bot: Ken Cheng is a comedian, professional poker player and presenter of Game Over, Human, 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 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, or Microsoft's TrueMatch software to pick good teams of online gameplayers.
Episode 3: AI Auditor Bot: Dr Pamela Ugwidike is an expert on the use of AI in justice systems and is particularly interested in how AI and data bias affect criminal justice. She wants to make an AI that can audit other AIs for bias to make sure that all Artificial Intelligences always operate 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 perhaps someone should check that it isn't just IBM's marketing department being a bit biased?
Episode 4: Support Bot: Olga Koch 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 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! If you like your robots to be cute then you can go to Japan and buy a Lovot companion robot, aka cuddlebot, that looks like a tellytubby and is designed to create an emotional bond with you. The My Special AFLAC Duck is a social robot that is used to comfort children in hospital.
Episode 5: Musical Director Bot: Professor 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 and AI tribute versions of Nirvana. AI's are now being trained to "get" the emotional contrent of songs, something which Spotify wants to take advantage of.

If you've enjoyed this podcast, come and see us live at one of our shows exploring the developing world of AI: Carr Crash