“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
– Arthur C. Clarke
16/02/2025
Artificial Intelligence
1hr 18min
It’s in the news, it pops up in your facebook feed, it’s a topic of conversation at weddings, family dinners and when you meet your mates for pints at the weekend. You can hardly turn your head these days without coming across A.I. or ‘Artificial Intelligence’. There’s a lot of hype around it, there are literal billions of dollars exchanging hands investing in it but depending on who you ask “what is AI?”, you will get many different answers. So rather than getting bogged down in the specifics, discussing particulars of the technology and it’s current state (which will likely be far more advanced before too long!), in this episode we take a journalistic approach to covering the topic and discuss the who, what, where, when, why and the how.
Mr C kicks off proceedings by setting our starting point with arguably the inventor of AI, Alan Turing, in the early 1950s. And it has been part of our culture and arts for nearly as long, to wonder about the possible benefits of this technology, including Rosie the family robot from the cartoon The Jetsons. So it seems the arrival of AI has been inevitable, but it is surprising and worth noting just how quickly it is developing and advancing. We touch back on this specific idea again later in the episode. Bringing us to the present day and how the general public interacts with these new AI systems, Mr Beard gives an overview on Large Language Models and how such a “simple” concept of predicting the next word in a sentence can result in surprisingly advanced and intricate content generation.
This brings us to one of the key topics we cover in this episode, that being the idea of “intelligence”. Interacting and studying these AI systems is making humans reconsider what we view and value as intelligent and even closer to our hearts, creative. One area that has already benefitted from the advancements of AI and its intelligence is in the medical field. Mr Beard mentions the AlphaFold project from DeepMind and how it discovered over 200 million different protein folded structures in just a couple of months (for which it won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry) – something that would have taken a number of lifetimes for humans to reach this level (if even it would have been possible for the human mind!). Layering on top of this, Mr C explains how scientists are using AI to identify microscopic cancer cells and tumor markers circulating in patients’ bodies. The medical breakthroughs seem to be only around the corner thanks to this technology.
Another accomplishment that AI has brought about is mapping the 50 million neural connections of a fruit fly’s brain. A key ability of AI and how it is able to produce these results is that AI doesn’t “think like a human”. It is a common goal that is bandied around whether AI can ‘think like a human yet’. But it is clear that we should set our sights much higher, start from the ground up and we will be able to invent something much more advanced. One area however where the human mind and soul still has a leg up over machines and AI is creativity. AI can create text and images and even music, but are these interesting to the human soul? The human condition allows us to make emotional connections with each other through art, connecting on a deeper level that machines cannot match (for now!).
It is not all rosie and utopic however as we see when we look at the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar and examine facebooks part in spreading fear and hate. The social media platform’s aim and goal was to simply increase user engagement, but understanding that fear and hate generate much more attention than peace and love, this benign goal was pursued at all costs resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths. This brings our conversation to the important topic of ethics – who is to blame when an AI system causes mistrust, death and destruction? Similarly with our music examples, who is the rightful owner of a piece of music that was generated almost entirely using AI? These are questions we will need to battle with as the technology develops further and becomes even more intertwined in our lives. While software developers and engineers invented this technology, we may need more philosophers in the future to help us live side by side with AI.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a field of computer science focused on creating systems capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence. The concept of AI dates back to the 1950s, when pioneers like Alan Turing and John McCarthy laid the groundwork for what would become a revolutionary technological field. Turing’s famous question, “Can machines think?” sparked the idea that machines could be built to simulate human-like intelligence, a notion that led to the birth of AI research. Early AI systems were limited, often relying on pre-programmed rules and algorithms, but advancements in computing power and data analysis have since greatly transformed the field.
In recent years, AI has made significant strides, from machine learning algorithms that allow computers to learn from vast datasets to deep learning models that mimic the brain’s neural networks. AI has already begun to permeate many aspects of our lives, from autonomous vehicles and personalized recommendations to healthcare, finance, and entertainment. As AI continues to evolve, it promises to revolutionize industries, enhance productivity, and tackle complex challenges, such as climate change and disease prevention. However, it also raises profound ethical and societal questions. Will AI outpace human intelligence, and what will that mean for jobs, privacy, and personal freedoms?
AI challenges our traditional understanding of intelligence and creativity. Historically, these traits have been seen as uniquely human, but AI systems are increasingly demonstrating capabilities that blur the lines. Can an AI system be truly creative, or is it simply synthesizing patterns from existing data? Furthermore, as AI takes on more roles traditionally reserved for humans, it forces us to reconsider what it means to be intelligent and creative. The future of AI holds incredible promise but also uncertainty, and it will undoubtedly continue to shape our world in ways we are only beginning to understand. The evolution of AI is not just a technological revolution—it is a philosophical one, questioning the very nature of thought, understanding, and human potential.
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A large language model (LLM) is a type of machine learning model designed for natural language processing tasks such as language generation. LLMs are language models with many parameters, and are trained with self-supervised learning on a vast amount of text.
The largest and most capable LLMs are generative pretrained transformers (GPTs), the most famous being ChatGPT by OpenAI. Modern models can be fine-tuned for specific tasks or guided by prompt engineering. Most of the hype you hear about AI in the news these days stem from the main 5 LLMs – ChatGPT (OpenAI), Llama (Meta), Gemini (Google), Claude (Anthropic) and DeepSeek (DeepSeek).
For more information on exactly how LLMs work, check out this great explainer video from IBM Technology.
AlphaFold is an artificial intelligence program developed by DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet, which performs predictions of protein structure. It is designed using deep learning techniques. Over 40 years, scientists discovered 140,000 different protein structures. With AlphaFold over the course of a couple months, they were able to discover over 200,000,000 protein structures. This has already led to a vaccine for malaria, synthetic antivenom to cure poisonous snake bites and big advances with diseases like schizophrenia and brain disorders.
Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind shared one half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, awarded “for protein structure prediction,” while the other half went to David Baker “for computational protein design.” Hassabis and Jumper had previously won the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 2023 for their leadership of the AlphaFold project.
To get an in dept view of how AlphaFold works and the scientists and engineers behind the project, watch this great video by the fantastic YouTube channel Veritasium.
In 2021, scientists made a significant breakthrough in mapping the entire brain of a fruit fly, achieving a level of detail never seen before. This remarkable feat was accomplished by using advanced imaging techniques, allowing the researchers to capture the intricate networks of neurons within the fruit fly’s brain. The challenge, however, lies in the overwhelming amount of data generated from these scans, which led to the incorporation of artificial intelligence for efficient analysis.
The role of AI in this process was pivotal, enabling the team to automate the identification of neural circuits, something that would have been incredibly time-consuming if done manually. By employing machine learning, the researchers were able to speed up the mapping process and identify key areas that influence behavior and cognition in the fly.
For more information on this breakthrough, read the USA National Institutes of Health (NIH) article on the matter here.
The Rohingya massacre in Myanmar, which unfolded in 2017, marked a tragic and brutal chapter in the country’s history. Tens of thousands of Rohingya Muslims were killed, and hundreds of thousands were forced to flee their homes, seeking refuge in neighboring Bangladesh. While the violence itself was devastating, the role of social media, particularly Facebook, in exacerbating the crisis cannot be overlooked. In the years leading up to the violence, Facebook became a platform for spreading hate speech, misinformation, and incitement to violence against the Rohingya. This rhetoric fueled ethnic and religious tensions and contributed to the Myanmar military’s campaign of violence.
Facebook’s role in the crisis has drawn widespread criticism, with the platform being used to amplify hate messages that spread quickly and widely, reaching millions in Myanmar and beyond. In the aftermath of the massacre, many human rights organizations and experts have pointed to social media’s role in enabling the escalation of violence, highlighting the platform’s failure to effectively moderate harmful content. The crisis in Myanmar serves as a stark reminder of the power social media holds in shaping narratives, influencing public opinion, and fueling real-world violence.
To read more about this devastating massacre and in particular facebooks role in it, check out this PBS News article.
There is real trepidation around the use of AI in music because it evokes so many questions about one, the legitimacy of using it to produce art in the form of music that has to this point been solely a human emotional and artistic expression.
AI can’t evoke human emotion surely? This video challenges this fundamental question and it is starting to make musicians (particularly this guy) uneasy that AI has gotten so good now, that it can and will challenge human artists and the feeling of technology replacing humans in many fields including creative fields is viewed as a threat.
Two, if AI is used to generate artwork like images and paintings, to music, will the human artist retain any IP on the product? There is certainly a grey area here, when it will come to legal rights to content or art. The same type of issues arose when the synthesiser was first developed and introduced in the 70’s and became widespread in the 80’s.
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