Podcasts discussing AI technology and applications

December 27, 2022 2:51 PM

I'm looking for recommendations for any podcasts or podcast episodes discussing technological developments in AI, interesting applications in different fields, and ethical and regulatory issues. Bonus for content specific to the legal industry or similar.

If you have recommendations for blog or substack content that would be welcome too. I'm most interested in practical application rather than super hard technical info or existential risk speculation. But really interested in anything you've got!

posted by lookoutbelow to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Best answer: Hard Fork by the NYTimes often touches on AI (it's a tech podcast more broadly, but obviously AI has been a big topic recently so most episodes at least touch on it).
posted by coffeecat at 4:07 PM on December 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

Best answer: You might want to look through the YouTube channel of physicist Sean Carroll's library, particularly the Mindscape section. Sean is interested in quantum computing, and he talks with a number of contemporary scholars on AI issues with respect to technology, legal issues, social impact. It's usually a dialog between the guest about their latest work. Really high level discussions. I hope you find some useful leads there.
posted by effluvia at 6:35 PM on December 27, 2022

Best answer: Ezra Klein has two pretty good podcasts, re-issued (?) from earlier this year. That both address AI and some of it's thornier aspects. Especially the one with Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. Title of the episode is "Best of: Who Wins - and who loses - in the A.I. Revolution?" Strong recommend (it does get pretty, "I'm from California and let me tell you about that..." at times but the over-all convo is solid.)
posted by From Bklyn at 7:12 AM on December 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks all! I've previously listened to the Ezra Klein and Hard Fork and very much enjoyed, I will check out that YouTube channel as well.
posted by lookoutbelow at 12:56 AM on December 29, 2022

Better late than never: Lex Fridman's podcast started out as a machine learning podcast, but has morphed into diverse long-form (and I mean long!) interviews on science, philosophy, politics, and more. Lex is an amazing interviewer, empathetic, curious, kind, and clever.

Some recent episodes on AI and its applications that are worth a listen:

* Noam Brown - AI vs Humans in Poker and Games of Strategic Negotiation (The importance of search to augment neural-nets in game-playing AI.)
* Andrej Karpathy - Tesla AI, Self-Driving, Optimus, Aliens, OpenAI, and AGI
* Kate Darling: Social Robots, Ethics, Privacy and the Future of MIT
* Rana el Kaliouby: Emotion AI, Social Robots, and Self-Driving Cars
* Michael Levin: Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots (Not AI related, but I guarantee that the Xenobots will blow your mind!)
* John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets (Cool look at early ID games, but Carmack is also now digging into the AI space.)
* Oriol Vinyals: Deep Learning, DeepMind, and Artificial General Intelligence
* Demis Hassabis: DeepMind - AI, Superintelligence & the Future of Humanity
* Wojciech Zaremba: OpenAI Codex, GPT-3, Robotics, and the Future of AI

I could go on, but you can cherry-pick other episodes that catch your attention here (click the "Show All" button). Links above are YouTube, but the podcast is available on all casting platforms.

I'll say once again that these are long podcasts, 2 to 5 hours in length, but they are also very well time-stamped. I listen to them in full, but jumping around would work too.
posted by stungeye at 6:14 AM on January 7, 2023