Martin Ciupa - Artificial Intelligence & Google LaMDA

We’re joined by Martin Ciupa to discuss Artificial Intelligence, Google LaMDA, The Singularity, AI Emotions, and much more... Martin Ciupa is a subject matter expert on artificial intelligence recognized as being in the top 100 experts in this field worldwide. He's the CEO of Remoscope Inc, an AI-based Telehealth startup, and an advisor & consultant to Mindmaze, a Unicorn Neurotech company focuses on applying advanced neuroscience to everyday life. Martin has decades of experience in computing and artificial intelligence, PhD studies in AI, and a Master’s Degree in Cybernetics. He joins us today to discuss some of today’s most interesting questions about artificial intelligence. We're starting out with ELIZA, “an early natural language processing computer program created from 1964 to 1966 at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Joseph Weizenbaum”. Online chatbots based similar to that ancient code are being called “Artificial Intelligence” by the business community. Is it confusing the general public? Ray Kurzweil predicted human-level Artificial General Intelligence this would be achieved in 2029 the date “for when an AI will pass a valid Turing test and therefore achieve human levels of intelligence”. Are we ahead of schedule for Kurzweil’s predicted breakthrough? The big question of the day is about Google LaMDA - is it sentient? Google researcher Blake Lemoine recently posted transcripts online from chat sessions with this natural language system that led him to believe it is sentient. Google says he’s mistaken, others aren’t so sure – what do you think, and if not, is it an indication that we’re getting close? The benchmark for artificial intelligence is called the “Turing test”, and in its original form the idea was that if a chatbot could convince a human that it was more human another person on chat, then it passed the test. Will advances like LaMDA render the Turing test obsolete, or does it mean that by 20th century standards this system is truly AI? Going beyond the Turing test, one of the big challenges with LaMDA and chatbots in general is distinguishing between the ability to construct meaningful speech and true artificial intelligent. The distinction is something called “qualia”, which is defined as “individual instances of subjective, conscious experience”, and may require some facsimile of human emotions as well - something called "affective computing". Ray Kurzweil predicted human-level AI by 2029, but also predicted a date for the Singularity by 2045, where self-improving AI will lead to a new form of super intelligent sentient AI. Martin discusses whether the The Singularity is likely to happen by that date, and what will be required in order for it to become reality - if we even want it to. The risks of runaway AI were popularized back in 1984 with James Cameron’s “The Terminator”, which put in place fears about AI well before the actual technology was invented. We're going to close with AI ethics, and a discussion of whether that series unfairly damaged AI research, or instead provided a valuable warning about to be careful how we design our mind-children in the future. Links & Resources: Martin Ciupa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martin-ciupa-76418b17/