What if we could cure loneliness? Philosophy, dopamine, and more with Mark Ungless

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Thinking Machines: AI & Philosophy

Daniel Reid Cahn

27 episodes

1 month ago

“Thinking Machines,” hosted by Daniel Reid Cahn, bridges the worlds of artificial intelligence and philosophy - aimed at technical audiences. Episodes explore how AI challenges our understanding of topics like consciousness, free will, and morality, featuring interviews with leading thinkers, AI leaders, founders, machine learning engineers, and philosophers. Daniel guides listeners through the complex landscape of artificial intelligence, questioning its impact on human knowledge, ethics, and the future. We talk through the big questions that are bubbling through the AI community, covering topics like "Can AI be Creative?" and "Is the Turing Test outdated?", introduce new concepts to our vocabulary like "human washing," and only occasionally agree with each other. Daniel is a machine learning engineer who misses his time as a philosopher at King's College London. Daniel is the cofounder and CEO of Slingshot AI, building the foundation model for psychology.

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Technology

Society & Culture,

Philosophy

What if we could cure loneliness? Philosophy, dopamine, and more with Mark Ungless

Thinking Machines: AI & Philosophy

1 hour 11 minutes

8 months ago

What if we could cure loneliness? Philosophy, dopamine, and more with Mark Ungless

Artificial neural networks were designed to emulate the human brain - and their insane performance on a wide range of tasks is pretty good evidence to support the comparison.

Well, it's a bit more complicated than that, at least according to my guest Mark Ungless, former neuroscience lecturer at Imperial and Oxford and current Director of AI at the UK's Mental Health Innovations. Mark and I have collaborated on research for 5+ years, and I've long enjoyed his thoughts on the biology of the brain, the philosophy of the mind, and how AI is changing (and being changed) by our understanding of both. In our latest conversation, we touch on...

His groundbreaking research on the biological root of loneliness
How understanding neuroscience helps you understand humans
How well neural networks represent our own minds (and whether it matters at all!)
AI’s ability to do therapy
What it means to have free will in a world where we understand more about our brains every day

For more conversations like this, be sure to follow our Youtube channel (@ThinkingMachinesPodcast) and subscribe to our show in your favorite podcast player.