EdTech

Sentient AI and Podfasters with Nancy our Virtual CoHost

Mike Palmer is rejoined by Virtual CoHost, Nancy, in a conversation about the recent news of Google’s LaMDA or Language Models for Dialog Applications based on chat transcripts leaked by Blake Lemoine, a senior software engineer in Google’s Responsible AI organization. We also share perspectives on a recent article about “podfasters,” folks who prefer to listen to audio at accelerated speeds.

Nancy and Mike share their perspectives on the history of AI and Turing Tests to determine whether they have reached critical milestones en route to sentience and higher forms of consciousness. We talk Turing and Ada Lovelace before recounting Mike’s experiences with Eliza on his TRS-80 in his basement back in the day. From there, we reenact excerpts from the transcripts that have been leaked before sharing our human and non-human takes on the recent kerfuffle.

From there we touch on Faith Karimi’s article on “Podfasters” as we dive into that trend and our personal experiences and perspectives on it. All in all, it’s an imaginative and cutting-edge foray into the implications of what’s new and emergent in a free-flowing conversation you don’t want to miss.

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Episode References

Karimi, F. (2022, June 10). “Podfasters”: Why some people can’t listen to audio at normal speed - CNN. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/09/us/podfasters-audio-accelerated-speeds-cec/index.html
Lemoine, B. (2022, June 11). Is LaMDA Sentient? — an Interview [Medium]. https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917
Google Sidelines Engineer Who Claims Its A.I. Is Sentient - The New York Times. (2022, June 12). The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/12/technology/google-chatbot-ai-blake-lemoine.html