intelligence

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.

Lex Fridman interviews Marcus Hutter of DeepMind about universal artificial intelligence, AIXI, Kolmogorov complexity, Solomonoff induction and the idea of intelligence as compression.

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.

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.

Lex Fridman interviews Jeff Hawkins, founder of Numenta and author of On Intelligence, about the Thousand Brains Theory and reverse-engineering the neocortex. They also cover Hierarchical Temporal Memory and brain-inspired AI architectures.

The full 1973 BBC Lighthill debate on artificial intelligence, featuring James Lighthill, Donald Michie, Richard Gregory and John McCarthy. It documents the argument that preceded the 1970s AI winter and includes early robot demos.

A Jordan Peterson university lecture on the Big Five trait openness to experience, covering creativity and intelligence. It explains how IQ is measured, how well it predicts life success, and the Pareto distribution of creative output.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A 2018 lecture, with subtitles available, by former Finnish intelligence colonel Martti J. Kari on Russian strategic culture. He walks through the historical layers of Russia and explains why the country behaves as it does.

Lex Fridman has a three-hour conversation with Joscha Bach about artificial consciousness, the workings of the mind, intelligence and the possibly simulated nature of reality.

A long Team House podcast interview with James Lawler, a former CIA operations officer who led counterproliferation work against the A.Q. Khan nuclear network. He discusses HUMINT, WMD and how such operations were run.

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.

Douglas Hofstadter's Stanford Presidential Lecture argues that analogy is the core of cognition, illustrating how concepts, categorization and thought arise from analogy-making.

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.

Lex Fridman interviews physicist Roger Penrose on consciousness, the limits of computation, quantum mechanics and his cyclic cosmology. It covers his views on AI and the big bang.

Shaun's roughly 2.7-hour video essay on The Bell Curve. It covers intelligence, the g factor, IQ tests, IQ versus environment and the politics behind the book, with a critical reading of the sources.

Lex Fridman talks with Tufts biologist Michael Levin about bioelectricity, embryogenesis, xenobots and how cells collectively pursue goals. They range into cognition, evolution and the possibility of aliens.

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.

Apple's WWDC 2024 keynote introducing Apple Intelligence along with iOS 18, iPadOS 18, macOS Sequoia, watchOS 11 and visionOS 2.

Dominion is a two-hour documentary using drones and hidden cameras to expose conditions in animal agriculture, including food, clothing, entertainment and research. It questions humanity's dominion over animals.

A compilation of the 1977 BBC series The Secret War, a documentary on British scientific and technical efforts in WWII, including radar, German navigation beams and V-weapons. It features interviews with people who were there, including Albert Speer.

Ben Anderson's VICE documentary shows embedded reporting on Afghan security forces and US Marines in Helmand during the troop drawdown, exposing incompetence, drug abuse and corruption.

Douglas Adams gives a talk at UCSB, recorded shortly before his death, about the odd lives of animals and what they suggest about humanity's future. It draws on his Last Chance to See work and is funny and wide-ranging.

The full 1971 Dutch television debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault on human nature, with subtitles. They discuss creativity, knowledge, power and politics.

Steve Blank's Computer History Museum lecture argues that Silicon Valley's roots lie in WWII radar and electronic warfare work, Stanford's Fred Terman and Cold War military funding rather than the semiconductor alone.

Lex Fridman interviews Navy pilot David Fravor, a primary witness of the 2004 Tic Tac UFO encounter, about the sighting, military aviation and aerospace engineering. The conversation runs close to four hours.

A long Portal podcast episode in which Bret Weinstein tells Eric Weinstein the story of his lab mice telomere work, the prediction behind it, and what it means for science and aging.

Neuroscientist Anil Seth gives a Royal Institution lecture on the science of consciousness. He separates conscious level, content and self, and argues that experience arises from the brain's predictive inference.

Kurzgesagt's hour-long animated film that compresses Earth's 4.5 billion year history into one hour, roughly a million years per second. It follows the evolution of life through to humanity's tiny final stretch.

Harvard Belfer Center lecture by Matthew Bunn explaining how nuclear bombs work, including fission and fusion weapons and which parts of bomb-making are hard. It is part 1 of 2 in the Nuclear 101 series.

Daniel Dennett's Royal Institution lecture on whether the brain is a computer and where its software comes from. He argues that minds are built by evolution and culture, with competence arising without comprehension.

Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky lectures on the evolution of behavior, including the Prisoner's Dilemma and tit-for-tat strategies in animals. It is part of his Human Behavioral Biology course.

Curt Jaimungal interviews biologist Michael Levin of Tufts about consciousness, bioelectricity, emergence, and cancer research. The conversation challenges reductionist views of life.

A 78-minute Richard Feynman lecture of anecdotes about working at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project, followed by about ten minutes of audience Q&A in which he tells three safe-cracking stories.

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.

A very long, detailed look at the A4/V2 rocket turbopump, the steam-turbine-driven twin propellant pump system. It covers the peroxide and permanganate catalysis that drives the turbine. This is part 1 of a series on V2 components.

A 2017 documentary filmed at the Santa Fe Institute in which novelist Cormac McCarthy talks with SFI's David Krakauer. They discuss isolation, mathematics, character and the nature of the unconscious.