Episode #26 - "Artificial Intelligence"

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

– Arthur C. Clarke

Date Published

16/02/2025

Main Topic

Artificial Intelligence

Length

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 b...