292. Gary Marcus — Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust
The Michael Shermer Show
Michael Shermer
4.3 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 16 August 2022
⏱️ 124 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Despite the hype surrounding AI, creating an intelligence that rivals or exceeds human levels is far more complicated than we have been led to believe. The achievements in the field thus far have occurred in closed systems with fixed sets of rules, and these approaches are too narrow to achieve genuine intelligence. The real world, in contrast, is wildly complex and open-ended. How can we bridge this gap? What will the consequences be when we do?
Shermer and Marcus discuss: why AI chatbot LaMDA is not sentient • "mind", "thinking", and "consciousness", and how do molecules and matter give rise to such nonmaterial processes • the hard problem of consciousness • the self and other minds • How would we know if an AI system was sentient? • Can AI systems be conscious? • free will, determinism, compatibilism, and panpsychism • language • Can we have an inner life without language? • How rational or irrational an animal are we?
Gary Marcus is a scientist, best-selling author, and entrepreneur. He is Founder and CEO of Robust.AI, and was Founder and CEO of Geometric Intelligence, a machine learning company acquired by Uber in 2016. He is the author of five books, including The Algebraic Mind, Kluge, The Birth of the Mind, and the New York Times best seller Guitar Zero, as well as editor of The Future of the Brain and The Norton Psychology Reader. He has published extensively in fields ranging from human and animal behavior to neuroscience, genetics, linguistics, evolutionary psychology and artificial intelligence, often in leading journals such as Science and Nature, and is perhaps the youngest Professor Emeritus at NYU. His newest book, co-authored with Ernest Davis, Rebooting AI: Building Machines We Can Trust aims to shake up the field of artificial intelligence.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | You're listening to the Michael Schurmer Show. |
| 0:11.6 | Welcome to The Michael Sherman Show |
| 0:28.4 | Welcome to the Michael Shimmer show. It's your host Michael Shimmer. I'm excited to tell you about a new sponsor we have. It's called W-R-E-N. R-N-R-N. R-R-N-R-N is a startup company working to make a meaningful difference in the climate crisis we currently face. As I'm recording this, the United States and |
| 0:35.8 | much of Europe is undergoing the worst heat wave in history. And if you look at the |
| 0:41.1 | heat records, pretty much every year is the hottest record on in history. |
| 0:47.0 | The hottest, it's just astonishing, it's real. |
| 0:50.0 | So you know my position on this, global warming is real and human caused. I'm not a |
| 0:53.8 | catastropheist. I don't think we're facing doom. I think we have time to do something |
| 0:58.9 | about it and that's what Wren is trying to do. It's a startup company that calculates your carbon footprint and when you |
| 1:06.0 | subscribe, this is really cool, they plant trees in your name. If you go to Wren W R E N dot C.O slash Schmer, S H E R, W R E N dot C, O, slash Schmer, to plant 10 trees in your name. And they'll even show you where they're planning |
| 1:23.6 | planning them how cool is that right we know that that's good because trees |
| 1:27.6 | are the lungs of the earth to clean our atmosphere of CO2 gases. All right. So that's the deal. Your carbon |
| 1:36.3 | footprint is really fun to calculate. I did it. Here is mine. Your carbon |
| 1:41.6 | footprint is 16 tons of CO2 a year. |
| 1:45.0 | Yikes. |
| 1:46.0 | Well, but that's not too bad. I'm actually below the United States average of 18.3, |
| 1:51.0 | so I'm 2.3 tons fewer than the average American, which is nice. I'm way more than India 2.4 and the world |
| 1:59.0 | at 4.9. Well, you know, I live in the United States. |
| 2:03.0 | Just across the board, it looks like I'm below average on goods and services, 5.2 versus the US average of 6.3, that's tons of CO2 per year. |
| 2:14.0 | Goods and services, homes and pets. |
| 2:16.4 | U.S. average is 1.3. |
| 2:17.7 | I'm at 3.5. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Michael Shermer, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Michael Shermer and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.