UPDATE: Some of you didn’t care for the sound effects, so here’s a version without them:
Since I have a philosopher in the family, I thought you might enjoy hearing a conversation with my father about what it means that we’ve built machines that can think and what we might learn from them about what it means to be human.
We discuss the way Large Language Models have altered our understanding of natural languages and learning algorithms, and the possibility that theoretical science may be obsolete: Perhaps it’s really data all the way down.
We discuss Chomsky and Skinner, human cognition, stimulus-response models, and the parallels—if any—between biological and artificial intelligence.
We also talk about the existential risks of AI, whether humans will remain the dominant species on this planet, and the broader implications for human knowledge. My father also reflects on the historical and sociological aspects of scientific innovation and the backgrounds of the key contributors to AI development.
I took the opportunity to practice my podcast production skills. I experimented with a few programs I’d never used before. If the sound effects strike you as peculiar, it’s because I couldn’t quite get them to do what I wanted, but also felt I’d devoted far too much time to trying to insert the sound of a flying bird at just right point and could no longer justify the effort. Let me know what you think: Should I keep trying to master the skill of professional podcast production? Or should I just throw the raw files on your plate from now on and say, “Eat. It’s what’s for dinner?”
I’m really unsure. Everyone tells me that journalists these days must have podcast and video editing skills, but acquiring them has proven awfully time consuming. On the other hand, I think probably I only have to learn once, and having learned, it won’t take nearly so much time.
Then again, I could just wait another year and have an LLM do it for me.
The Philosophical Ramifications of Artificial Intelligence