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Episode Summary: Studying the mind has influenced, and will continue to influence, the development of artificial intelligence. In a largely digital world, Bruce turns a clarifying light on the topic of digital versus analog computing, and articulates on how the latter may be making a slow comeback in the wake of discoveries in neural information processing.

1 - IBM Acquires Merge Healthcare to Grow Watson

IBM announced Thursday that it had made its third acquisition of a healthcare company, since establishing its Watson health business in April. The purchase is the next layer on top of an already established partnership with pharmacy giant CVS, with which it will work to spearhead data-driven diagnostics and advisory services that help customers with chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease. Watson will be able to take in a more holistic picture of a customers' health, rather than blindly narrow in on any abnormalities. Watson owes its advances in the health world to IBM researchers, who have been training it in image recognition.

Episode Summary: The brain that we have is suited to our past, not our present - and is the (sometimes unfortunate) result of evolution stumbling forward for hundreds of thousands of years. In this episode, we aim to make sense of and deal with it. Dr. Gary Marcus shares his insight as to what the brain is good and bad at, and why - in addition to what this might imply for the future of human enhancement.

Joanne Pransky received her BA from Tufts University in the mid 1980’s, and began championing public awareness and exposure to robotics and AI technology, playfully calling herself the “first robot psychiatrist.” Since then, she’s been featured on CNN, The Discovery Channel, the Sci-Fi Channel, and even the Tonight Show with Jay Leno - aiming to expose the world to technology and it’s ethical implications.

Dr. Hables Gray graduated with a PhD in applied philosophy from UCAL Santa Cruz, and is best known for his writings on technology, war, and cyborgs (the combination of organic and inorganic, the evolved and the invented).

1 - Google’s Visual AI “Inception”
The in middle of last month, Google published an article on the Google Research blog called “Inceptionism: Going Deeper in Neural Networks.” Frankly, the title didn’t seem all that appealing, and it’s unlikely that it would have jumped out as anything other than science-jargon, even to people signed up for RSS of Google’s blog.

Sean Blacknell has spent the last year working on a film called “The Future of Work and Death,” based on interviews with futurists, economists, philosophers, and other experts - with an aim to bring the film to Sundance and other prominent festivals in the coming year.

Dr. Roger Schank received his PhD from Stanford, taught at Yale, and altogether has spent around three decades attempting to solve the big problems of artificial intelligence.
In this interview, Dr. Schank talks about a kind of helpful “teaching” artificial intelligence that would go beyond Siri and help us to make the right decisions at the right times given our own objectives. He explains why he believes such a project is not on Google’s agenda, and what he believes might be required to create such an AI.

Dr. Nick Montfort doesn’t hold Shakespeare and DaVinci as the high water mark of “creativity,” nor does he believe that human creative endeavor is the only worthwhile kind.
In this interview, Dr. Montfort shares some of his own examples of how computers can aide the creative process in ways that might result in “art” that humans aren’t capable of making alone. In addition, he provides his insight as to where the intersections of artificial intelligence and “creativity” might really lie.
Check out this episode on Libsyn.

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Guest: Professor Nayef Al-Rodhan, PhD