Welcome to Roon Soup, a weekly podcast about magic, culture and the paranormal.

My name is Gordon and I shall be your host.

This week we welcome to the show Kenrick McDowell.

Kenrick is a musician, public speaker, an AI curator for Google Research.

We discuss AI inevitably, but not from either a lurid the world is ending way, or from

a techno-utopian jibber-jub a way. Instead, we look at what the implications of AI are for personhood, a theory of technology and its appropriateness,

and whether we are teaching AI to think, or whether it is teaching us to. Enjoy.

Kenrick, welcome aboard.

Thank you.

All right, so, so question the first.

Kenrick, were you a weird kid?

Yeah, I think so.

I think I was a weird kid.

But. So I think I was a weird kid. But I didn't see ghosts or anything. It wasn't weird in that kind of way. I think just kind of demographically. I'm a weird person. You know I grew up in the East Bay and the Bay Area in California, which is a pretty diverse place but I come from mixed heritage. I'm Filipino, Chinese, Spanish,

Scottish and Irish so I'm kind of, you know, ethnically queer so to speak in a in a bit of a weird demographic zone so I think by virtue of that alone I probably

was a little weird but you know in terms of my personality I definitely was I'm told I was

somewhat imperious as a young child.

Sameses.

And you know it's funny I did have you know a few very kind of small scale maybe strange experiences or

you know capital W weird experiences as a child in the form of fever dreams and kind of night

hallucinations and I've only met maybe one other person who could understand exactly what I was talking about.

But you elaborate on them because now you've met two?

...