Peter Bentley: Digital biology & understanding ourselves | Thinking About Thinking Podcast #2 скачать в хорошем качестве

Peter Bentley: Digital biology & understanding ourselves | Thinking About Thinking Podcast #2

Peter Bentley leads the Digital Biology group at University College London, which studies topics in biologically-inspired computing such as evolutionary computation, swarm intelligence. Peter's work on evolving tables was the first to demonstrate that an evolutionary algorithm could produce truly novel designs, thus helping found the field of evolutionary design. For more on his work in evolutionary design, see "The Surprising Creativity of Digital Evolution": https://direct.mit.edu/artl/article/2... Peter is also a prolific author, and you can find his most recent book "Artificial Intelligence and Robotics: 10 Short Lessons" here: https://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Int... OUTLINE: 0:00 - Introduction 0:59 - Why hasn't evolutionary computation received as much attention as other forms of AI? 5:59 - What is an evolutionary process? 8:12 - Evolution requires lots of testing, and testing is expensive 11:20 - Better building blocks may be the breakthrough evolutionary computing needs 13:02 - Parametric design vs. evolving designs from building blocks 14:56 - Genes are not parameterizations, they are recipes that interact with our environment 17:39 - Why hasn't evolution invented wheels? 21:48 - In an alternate universe, could life on Earth be built from something other than proteins? 23:10 - What is intelligence? Is an ivy plant intelligent? Or an ant colony? 30:00 - Humanlike artificial general intelligence (AGI) needs a Petri dish of hard human problems 32:06 - Humans are the way we are because of environmental challenges in our evolutionary history 35:25 - Why do we evolve out of environmental niches? 37:35 - Do we need AGI? Do we want it? 48:17 - Is it surprising that we can mimic aspects of intelligence, seemingly without understanding it very well? 50:53 - Technology must be applied cleverly and with care 53:08 - Are we in for another AI winter? 1:01:07 - What should we work on? 1:04:02 - Peter's fundamental question: Who are we? What are we? Why are we? Apologies for the audio quality on this one. We will think about the best way to maximize audio quality for remote guests, and have a much improved setup for our next remote episode. Thanks for listening!