Pia Lauritzen questions our use of questions, the nature of humanity, the premise of AGI, the essence of tech, if humans can be optimized and why thinking is required.

Pia and Kimberly discuss the function of questions, curiosity as a basic human feature, AI as an answer machine, why humans think, the contradiction at the heart of AGI, grappling with the three big Es, the fallacy of human optimization, respecting humanity, Heidegger’s eerily precise predictions, the skill of critical thinking, and why it’s not really about the questions at all.

Pia Lauritzen, PhD is a philosopher, author and tech inventor asking big questions about tech and transformation. As the CEO and Founder of Qvest and a Thinkers50 Radar Member Pia is on a mission to democratize the power of questions.

Related Resources

• Questions (Book): https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/23069/questions
• TEDx Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/pia_lauritzen_what_you_don_t_know_about_questions
• Question Jam: www.questionjam.com
• Forbes Column: forbes.com/sites/pialauritzen
• LinkedIn Learning: www.Linkedin.com/learning/pialauritzen
• Personal Website: pialauritzen.dk

A transcript of this episode is here.

Michael Strange has a healthy appreciation for complexity, diagnoses hype as antithetical to innovation and prescribes an interdisciplinary approach to making AI well.

Michael and Kimberly discuss whether AI is good for healthcare; healthcare as a global system; radical shifts precipitated by the pandemic; why hype stifles nuance and innovation; how science works; the complexity of the human condition; human well-being vs. health; the limits of quantification; who is missing in healthcare and health data; the political-economy and material impacts of AI as infrastructure; the doctor in the loophole; the humility required to design healthy AI tools and create a resilient, holistic healthcare system.

Michael Strange is an Associate Professor in the Dept of Global Political Affairs at Malmö University focusing on core questions of political agency and democratic engagement. In this context he works on Artificial Intelligence, health, trade, and migration. Michael directed the Precision Health & Everyday Democracy (PHED) Commission and serves on the board of two research centres: Citizen Health and the ICF (Imagining and Co-creating Futures).

Related Resources

• If AI is to Heal Our Healthcare Systems, We Need to Redesign How AI Is Developed (article): https://www.techpolicy.press/if-ai-is-to-heal-our-healthcare-systems-we-need-to-redesign-how-ai-itself-is-developed/
• Beyond ‘Our product is trusted!’ – A processual approach to trust in AI healthcare (paper) https://mau.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1914539
• Michael Strange (website): https://mau.se/en/persons/michael.strange/

A transcript of this episode is here.

Andriy Burkov talks down dishonest hype and sets realistic expectations for when LLMs, if properly and critically applied, are useful. Although maybe not as AI agents.

Andriy and Kimberly discuss how he uses LLMs as an author; LLMs as unapologetic liars; how opaque training data impacts usability; not knowing if LLMs will save time or waste it; error-prone domains; when language fluency is useless; how expertise maximizes benefit; when some idea is better than no idea; limits of RAG; how LLMs go off the rails; why prompt engineering is not enough; using LLMs for rapid prototyping; and whether language models make good AI agents (in the strictest sense of the word).

Andriy Burkov holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and is the author of The Hundred Page Machine Learning and Language Models books. His Artificial Intelligence Newsletter reaches 870,000+ subscribers. Andriy was previously the Machine Learning Lead at Talent Neuron and the Director of Data Science (ML) at Gartner. He has never been a Ukrainian footballer.

Related Resources

• The Hundred Page Language Models Book: https://thelmbook.com/
• The Hundred Page Machine Learning Book: https://themlbook.com/
• True Positive Weekly (newsletter): https://aiweekly.substack.com/

A transcript of this episode is here.