In this episode, we are joined by our first artificial guest: OpenAI's new large language model based ChatGPT. After discussing large language models in several of the latest episodes and OpenAI releasing ChatGPT two weeks ago, it felt like the perfect time for this experiment. I tried showcasing some of ChatGPT different talents, from giving detailed essay-like scientific explanations to speaking other languages to making puns and improvising rap battles. To make the episode more entertaining, I adjusted some of the prompts and cut some of the responses. However, all of the responses are 100% real. ChatGPT's text output was then transformed via Polly from AWS to spoken word, which was further edited to make it sound more realistic. The thumbnail portrait was also generated artificially, using a GAN based on StyleGAN2. The recent advances in AI remain simultaneously impressive and slightly disconcerting. For inquiries, reach out to manu.brenn@gmail.com
In this episode, our host Manuel Brenner is joined by Alejandro Daniel Noel. Alejandro got his masters from TU Delft working with Acitive Inference and the Free Energy Principle, and is now a full time software engineer at Google in Zürich, specializing on machine learning engineering of language models for conversational AI.
We discuss the free energy principle, active inference, the role of uncertainty, latent variable models, language and tokenization, causality, diffusion models, DALL-E, paths towards AGI, JEPA, language and consciousness, attention, self-attention, and many more topics.
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In this episode, host Manuel Brenner is joined by Jonathan Banks, international director the Global Super Pollutants program for the Clean Air Task Force.
This is the final episode of a 4-part miniseries that ACIT is hosting together with the CATF. The Clean Air Task Force (CATF) is a global non-profit organization working to safeguard against the worst impacts of climate change by catalyzing the rapid global development and deployment of low-carbon energy and other climate-protecting technologies through research, analysis, public advocacy leadership, and partnership with the private sector.
In this episode, we primarily discuss the super pollutant methane. We discuss where methane emissions primarily come from, its impact on the climate, and how reducing emissions could have significant effects on reducing global warming. We cover why incentives are surprisingly aligned around methane, the role the gas and oil industry plays, detecting leaks via cameras and satellites, an increasing awareness around methane emissions, and a strong increase in political action in recent years.
We end by discussing why methane is a source of hope for the climate sector since it promises short term impact with good incentives and without relying on uncertain technologies.
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Find out more about the Clean Air Task Force: https://www.catf.us/about/
In this episode, host Manuel Brenner is joined by Carlos Leipner, international director the Global Nuclear Energy Strategy for the Clean Air Task Force.
This is the third episode of a 4-part miniseries that ACIT is hosting together with the CATF. The Clean Air Task Force (CATF) is a global non-profit organization working to safeguard against the worst impacts of climate change by catalyzing the rapid global development and deployment of low-carbon energy and other climate-protecting technologies through research, analysis, public advocacy leadership, and partnership with the private sector.
In this episode, we discuss nuclear energy, recent technological developments and third and fourth generation reactors, the important role nuclear could play in developing a carbon free energy sector, scaling and streamlining production, nuclear for hydrogen production, Europe vs. Asia, the risks of nuclear and how to assess them in light of recent developments in Ukraine, how the Ukrainian war has changed uranium prizes and changed the landscape again, how nuclear waste factors in, how European is changing its attitude towards nuclear energy, and many more topics.
Stay updated with future episodes and other events ACIT is hosting: https://mailchi.mp/0346443b6ddf/acit-global-signup
Find out more about the Clean Air Task Force: https://www.catf.us/about/
In this episode, Manuel Brenner is joined by Armond Cohen.
Armond Cohen is co-founder and Executive Director of the Clean Air Task Force, which he has led since its formation in 1996.
The Clean Air Task Force (CATF) is a global non-profit organization working to safeguard against the worst impacts of climate change by catalyzing the rapid global development and deployment of low-carbon energy and other climate-protecting technologies through research, analysis, public advocacy leadership, and partnership with the private sector.
This is the first episode of a 3-part miniseries that ACIT is hosting together with the CATF.
In this episode, we discuss what the CATF is and how it works, current paradigms in the climate movement, the importance of optionality, why wind and solar will probably not be exclusive solutions to the issue of climate change, how to advance a carbon-free energy sector in developing countries without falling back to neo-colonial policies, optimism vs. apocalyptic thinking in the climate movement, politics and partisanship in the US and internationally and how they interact with innovation in the energy sector, what changes the endorsement of the CATF by the effective altruism foundation have made possible in recent years, and much more.
Find out more about the Clean Air Task Force:
https://www.catf.us/about/
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https://mailchi.mp/0346443b6ddf/acit-global-signup
In this episode, host Manuel Brenner talks to Mark Solms.
Mark Solms is the Chair of Neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town, President of the South African Psychoanalytical Association, and the author of 8 books and hundreds of scientific articles. His most well-known scientific contributions include discovering the brain mechanisms of dreaming, and combining psychoanalysis and neuropsychology in an approach he coined "neuropsychoanalysis".
In this episode, we primarly discuss ideas from his newest book "The Hidden Spring", which delves into the relationships between affect, its source in the brainstem, Karl Friston's free energy principle, and how it all relates to a new theory for a "hidden spring" of consciousness.
We discuss Mark Solm's motivation for combining psychoanalysis and neuropsychology and historic reasons for why the subject has been long neglected in psychology. We move on the talking about affect and valence, what role they play in our experiental life, and how they might give us a new handle for approaching a scientific theory of consciuousness. We discuss how current cortical theories of consciousness interact with problems surrounding Chalmer's hard problem of consciousness, epistemology, and metacognition, and why the current neuroscientific evidence points away from the cortical towards an affective view of consciousness.
We close by discussing the relationship of affective consciousness to Karl Friston's free energy principle and the theory that Mark Solms developed with Friston, and questions of responsibility around using this theory to build an artificial consciousness.
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Dr. sc. hum. Henrik Jungaberle is the Director of the MIND Foundation and a CEO of OVID. He is a researcher, science entrepreneur, and author in public health, psychedelics, and psychotherapy.
In this episode, Henrik Jungaberle speaks with host Manuel Brenner about augmenting psychotherapy with psychedelics, how psychedelic substances can and need to be combined with therapy in a clinical setting, whether psychedelics work more strongly on the mind or on the brain, in what ways they could transform psychotherapy (and in which ways they probably won't), what role capitalism and enterpreneurship will play, how to factor in historical perspective, and many more topics.
Find out more about ACIT under acit-science.com
In this episode, Amal Ounali is joining our host Manuel Brenner for a discussion on international criminal law, European law, how national laws and international laws interact (and sometimes collide), human rights, discrimination, and many more topics.
Amal is studying for her Master of Law at the University of Geneva and is currently doing am exchange in the University of Utrecht, focusing on criminal law in a European and transnational context.
Find out more about ACIT under https://acit-science.com/
In this episode, host Manuel Brenner is joined by Rim Jasmin Irscheid. Rim is a doctoral candidate in the Music Department at King's College London, working on experimental music and 'world music' festival culture in Europe. Her research sits at the boundary between ethnomusicology and sociology.
We discuss the controversial history of the term "world music", the role music plays in narratives of integration and in the way Germany is dealing with its past, the instrumentalisation of narratives of other cultures, hallmarks of experimental music, the role of experimental music in Germany and the Middle East, making money in the modern music scene, organizing music festivals and the importance of life music, the role of Spotify and Youtube in today's music industry, affective musicianship, and many more topics.
Find out more about ACIT: https://acit-science.com/
In this episode, we are joined by Jasper Götting, PhD Candidate at the Institute of Virology of the Hannover Medical School, where his research focuses on the sequencing and monitoring of viruses.
We discuss what a virus is, the differences between RNA and DNA viruses, how we are all infected by Herpes viruses, and why this matters for organ transplants. We delve into flu viruses and corona viruses and some of their elegant and dangerous features, monitoring in the context of pandemics, virological weather forecasts, pandemic risk, manmade pandemics vs. natural pandemics, the risks of gain-of-function research, and the early warning center in Berlin.
We talk about Jasper's engagement in the Effective Altruism community and how this has shaped his career choices, about wild animal suffering, meat production, 80 000 hours, and many more topics.
The podcast is hosted by Manuel Brenner.
In this episode, we are joined by Marcel Moosbrugger, computer science PhD Candidate at Vienna University of Technology.
We talk about getting into coding and computer science, the advantages of being a researcher in computer science and implementing ideas quickly, the foundations of computing and mathematics, Gödel incompleteness, the halting problem and how it connects to free will and determinism, Marcel's work on the halting of probabilistic programs and its relationship to debugging, how formal methods are becoming increasingly important in making industrial applications like the Amazon Web Services smart contracts more secure, and how industry in science are working closely together on the frontier of AI.
The podcast is hosted by Manuel Brenner.