Episode #436
Skeptics with a K
Skeptic Media Limited
4.8 • 924 Ratings
🗓️ 16 October 2025
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Mike asks if the Turing Test is really a meaningful tool for gauging the state of artificial intelligence, and the team has the last few announcements for QED 2025.
Online tickets for the final QED are still available, pick up yours today. You can also chat with us on the Skeptics in the Pub Discord server.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It is Thursday, the 16th of October 2025, and you're listening to Skeptics with a K, |
| 0:12.5 | the podcast for Science, Reason, and Critical Thinking. |
| 0:16.0 | Skeptics with the K is produced by Skeptic Media in association with the Merseyside |
| 0:19.7 | Skeptic Society, a non-profit organisation for the promotion of scientific skept with the Merseyside Skeptic Society, |
| 0:25.1 | a non-profit organisation for the promotion of scientific skepticism on Merseyside around the UK and internationally. |
| 0:26.6 | I'm your host, Mike Hall. |
| 0:27.9 | With me today is Marsh. |
| 0:29.2 | Hello. |
| 0:29.8 | And Alice. |
| 0:30.9 | So AI seems to be slowly eating the world. |
| 0:34.7 | It's bad. |
| 0:35.7 | I'm sure this is something you've both noticed. |
| 0:55.4 | Yeah, I mean, it keeps coming up in the stories that I've been doing because whenever I talk about a dodgy advert or something, inevitably, all of the content is written by AI. AI generated. Yeah, yeah. From my own perspective, as a software engineer, it's a tool that we are increasingly being encouraged to use. |
| 1:00.0 | Yep. And not just use, but there's some people in my industry who are arguing that we can dispense with junior grade engineers and just use AI for that. Right. That makes sense. |
| 1:06.0 | There's going to be nothing left because there's already a lot fewer middle management jobs than they |
| 1:10.1 | used to be. Yeah. |
| 1:11.3 | Yeah. |
| 1:12.2 | And I'm not persuaded by that time. |
| 1:14.3 | I'm not persuaded that we can replace junior software engineers with AI, not least because |
| 1:18.3 | well, who's going to be the senior software engineers? |
| 1:20.2 | Exactly. |
| 1:20.7 | Yeah. |
... |
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