I never thought I would be a podcast host, but…Abha Eli Phoboo, the director of communications at the Santa Fe Institute, recently relaunched SFI’s official podcast, Complexity, and proposed that each season, an SFI faculty member co-host the podcast with her for six episodes on a topic of their choice.
Last season, my colleague Chris Kempes co-hosted six fascinating episodes on “The Physics of Life”. And now it’s my turn. Abha and I (and our producer Katherine Moncore) have put together the second season, on “The Nature of Intelligence”. I have to say that it’s been a challenge like none I’ve done before, but I’m excited about the results.
Our six episodes have a terrific lineup of cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, animal cognition researchers, and AI experts, giving their perspectives (and often controversial opinions) on what “intelligence” means in humans, animals, and machines, where we are with AI right now, and how far it has to go.
The season launches September 25. I hope you’ll check it out, as they say, “wherever you get your podcasts”. Just search for “Complexity”.
You can listen to the trailer at https://complexity.simplecast.com/episodes/trailer-for-the-nature-of-intelligence.
You are covering an extremely important topic:
GenAI, and more specifically LLMs augmented with additional ground truth info, has commoditized KNOWLEDGE. However, INTELLIGENCE, is uniquely human (i.e. not machine). Even OpenAI's latest model, o1, is mimicking human reasoning, but it is along way off from emulating full human reasoning that includes perception, cognition, empathy and other uniquely human faculties.
Longtime fan, so glad you're hosting a podcast. I'll be sure to check it out.