artificial intelligence

A 2007 Google Tech Talk introducing Polyworld, an artificial life simulator used to evolve artificial intelligence by designing worlds rather than minds. It presents results from ongoing attempts to evolve intelligent behavior.

John Searle's Talk at Google on consciousness and artificial intelligence, hosted by Google's Singularity Network. He presents his philosophy of mind and Chinese room argument that computation is syntactic and cannot capture semantics.

Andrew Ng speaks at the Stanford MSx Future Forum about how AI is transforming industry after industry, comparing its impact to electricity. The talk also touches on evil-AI worries, jobs and basic income.

Joel Grus's JupyterCon talk explaining why he dislikes Jupyter notebooks. He covers hidden state, trouble with reproducibility and testing, and how notebooks frustrate teaching. He shows his preferred workflow and what Jupyter could change.

A Munk Debate on the proposition that AI research and development poses an existential threat. Yoshua Bengio and Max Tegmark argue for it, and Melanie Mitchell and Yann LeCun argue against.

Joscha Bach's 31c3 talk argues that the mind should be understood as an information-processing system and that even the physical universe can be seen as computational. It tours the philosophy underlying artificial intelligence and cognitive science.

Steve Hsu's 2011 Google Tech Talk reviews psychometric measurement of intelligence and the heritability of adult IQ, then discusses genome-wide association studies seeking the genes behind cognitive ability.

Joscha Bach's 35C3 talk offers an AI perspective on the soul, covering perception, mental representation, agency, consciousness and selfhood as things that can arise in a computational system like the brain.

Developmental and synthetic biologist Michael Levin speaks at a Harvard Extension student event on bioelectricity, body intelligence and regenerative medicine. He discusses how cell electrical networks guide growth and form.

A panel from the Beneficial AI 2017 conference moderated by Max Tegmark, with Elon Musk, Stuart Russell, Kurzweil, Hassabis, Harris, Bostrom, Chalmers and others. They discuss likely outcomes of human-level AGI and what outcomes are desirable.

Michael Levin's NeurIPS 2018 talk on bioelectric computation outside the nervous system, showing how cell electrical networks shape development and regeneration. It covers morphological information processing in living tissue.

Michael Levin's keynote at the ALife 2020 conference, 'Robot Cancer', on how bioelectric signaling in embryogenesis and regeneration informs unconventional computing, cognition and the 'software of life'. He argues biology offers lessons for building adaptive machines.

Charles Stross's 34C3 talk on how science fiction gets the future wrong. He argues that corporations are slow, human-powered AIs that optimize for profit, and that regulation lags behind accelerating technology.

Demis Hassabis of DeepMind speaks at Google Zeitgeist, saying human-level AI is decades away but the debate should start now. He covers DeepMind's focus on game-playing agents.

Ray Kurzweil presents his book How to Create a Mind at Google, on reverse engineering the brain and using that understanding to build intelligent machines. He shows his graphs of exponential technological progress.

Sandy Pentland of MIT presents his book on social physics, which uses big-data studies of how people interact to explain how ideas spread. He describes findings on collective intelligence and social influence.

Jeff Hawkins presents his view that the neocortex works on principles different from traditional computers. He describes sparse distributed representations and how they are learned, then shows how Numenta applies them to predict from high-velocity data streams.

Bryan Cantrill's Monktoberfest 2023 talk takes on AI doomerism, weighing the theoretical existential risks against the reality on the ground. He takes a skeptical but thoughtful view of how to balance AI's potential against its risks.

Joseph Henrich's Talks at Google presentation of his book. He argues that human success comes from collective brains and cultural learning across generations rather than individual intelligence.

A Talks at Google visit by Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the mouse. He presents his lifelong aim of augmenting collective human intelligence, followed by a Q&A.

A short edited excerpt of Terence McKenna arguing that culture acts as an operating system for the mind, set to imagery and music. It touches on psychedelics and how they change thinking.

Moral philosopher James Flynn explains the Flynn effect, the steady rise of IQ scores across the 20th century. He argues the shift reflects a move toward abstract, hypothetical thinking as cognitively demanding professions grew.

Daniel Dennett gives a Royal Institution talk toward a unified theory of information, tying together evolution, learning and engineering. He argues that design can arise bottom-up through small steps without a designer.

Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor describes watching her own brain functions shut down during a massive stroke. She gives a first-person account of losing speech, motion and self-awareness.

Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues in this TED talk that evolution shaped perception to track fitness rather than truth. He uses evolutionary simulations and the Australian jewel beetle as examples.

Joscha Bach's 32C3 talk applies computational theories of mind to questions of meaning, emotion, and love, asking how computation can explain irrational-seeming human experience.

Sebastian Seung's TED talk introduces the connectome, the map of neural connections he argues defines each person. He explains how mapping it could change how we understand brains and minds.

Philosopher Dan Dennett argues in a TED talk that we do not understand our own consciousness and that our brains often fool us. He uses perceptual examples, including a painting that invites the viewer to fill in detail.

Neuroscientist Anil Seth argues in this TED talk that perception is a controlled hallucination: the brain constantly predicts the world and our shared agreement is what we call reality. He also touches on the construction of the self.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett visits Google to discuss his book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, describing thought experiments and thinking tools across psychology, biology, computer science and physics.

Neuroscientist Beau Lotto runs the audience through color and pattern illusions to show that perception is shaped by context and evolutionary history rather than being a direct readout of the world. The talk is playful and hands-on, and it argues that the brain interprets ambiguous signals.

The 2016 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate, moderated by Neil deGrasse Tyson, in which a panel of physicists and philosophers debates whether the universe is a simulation. Participants include David Chalmers, Zohreh Davoudi and James Gates.

An Intelligence Squared debate in which Will Self argues for Brave New World and Adam Gopnik for Nineteen Eighty-Four as the better dystopian warning. It includes acted excerpts and is chaired by Jonathan Freedland.

Sam Harris argues in a TED talk that we will build superhuman AI and have not grappled with the risk of creating something that may treat us the way we treat ants. He makes a logical case for taking AI risk seriously.

The Grugq's Hack In The Box 2012 talk on operational security for hackers, drawing on hacker indictments and counter-intelligence research. It reviews OPSEC goals and methods for avoiding detection and arrest, with case studies of how hackers got caught.

Steve Blank tells how World War II, Stanford's Frederick Terman and military and intelligence agencies shaped the rise of Silicon Valley. The talk centers on the Cold War electronic warfare and signals intelligence work that seeded the region's tech industry.

Poul-Henning Kamp's FOSDEM 2014 talk is a hypothetical account of how an intelligence agency such as the NSA would sabotage open source software, standards and online discussion. It covers Skype's history, OpenSSL and psyops against standards.

Simon Knowles, co-founder and CTO of Graphcore, talks about "intelligence processors", chips designed specifically for machine learning. The talk was given at the RAAIS 2017 summit and covers Graphcore's architecture.

Lukas Eder's Devoxx talk on how modern cost-based SQL optimizers rewrite and plan queries in ways developers would not expect. It argues that declarative SQL, used well, can run complex queries very fast.

Poul-Henning Kamp's FOSDEM 2014 talk presents a fictitious NSA program called ORCHESTRA, satirizing how intelligence agencies could influence startups and open source. It is a humorous but pointed look at surveillance and subverted software.