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637 interviews · 5,012 quotes
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In this interview, I spoke to Professor Karl Friston, the neuroscientist behind the free energy principle, about why the brain perceives from the inside out, where free will fits into a predictive…
In this interview, I spoke to Dave Plummer, the Microsoft engineer who wrote Windows Task Manager, about growing up undiagnosed autistic, why Microsoft's whiteboard interviews suited him, rebuilding Task Manager with AI…
In this interview, I spoke to Professor Susan Schneider, the philosopher who held NASA's astrobiology chair, about why asking whether ChatGPT is conscious is a category mistake, how consciousness might sit beneath…
In this interview, I spoke to Michael and Liam Bates of the Principality of Sealand, a wartime fort in the North Sea that Britain tried to cut off, mercenaries seized and a…
In this interview, I spoke to Sherry Turkle, the MIT psychologist who has spent forty years studying our relationships with machines, about her new book Artificial Intimacy: why a chatbot cannot be…
In this interview, I spoke to David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails and co-owner of 37signals, about why he stopped writing code by hand, why AI is ending programmers' monopoly…
In this interview, I spoke to Carlos Gutierrez, former US Secretary of Commerce and the youngest chief executive in Kellogg's history, about fleeing Cuba as a child, selling cereal from a van…
In this interview, I spoke to Jesper Kouthoofd, founder of Teenage Engineering, about why he still refuses the title of designer, why he thinks every product is an illusion and the honest…
In this interview, I spoke to Jonathan Caplan KC, one of Britain's most senior barristers, who has spent 50 years applying the evidentiary standards of the criminal Bar to unidentified anomalous phenomena.…
In this interview, I spoke to Michelle Gielan, positive psychology researcher, former CBS Morning News anchor and author of Resilient Optimism, about why optimism is a set of behaviours rather than a…
In this interview, I spoke to Major General Arthur Denaro, who led his regiment through sixteen kilometres of minefield to liberate Kuwait and was Chief of Staff of UN forces in Bosnia.…
In this interview, I spoke to Professor Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, about when individual leaders genuinely change outcomes. We discussed discretion, timing, his Hamlet Test for…
In this interview, I spoke to Ian Proud, a former British diplomat and Foreign Office crisis expert, who drove nine hours into the 2004 tsunami zone on Boxing Day. We discussed what…
In this interview, I spoke to Professor Anthony Kaldellis, who argues the eastern Roman Empire was no absolutism but a polity governed by consent, where rulers who misread the public mood were…
In this interview, I spoke to Dr Tom McClelland, the Cambridge philosopher who argues we should be agnostic about AI consciousness. We discussed why language models have broken humanity's tools for detecting…
In this interview, I spoke to Professor Michael Levin, who argues that cognition came before life rather than after it. We discussed bioelectric "cognitive glue", xenobots and anthrobots, why six lines of…
In this interview, I spoke to Victor Vescovo, one of only two people to have stood at Earth's highest peak, descended to its deepest trench and looked back at the planet from…
In this interview, I spoke to Eric Ries, creator of the Lean Startup method and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, who argues that corporate corruption is structural rather than moral. We…
In this interview I speak to author Turi Munthe, who argues that climate, geography, genes, brain shape and ancestral agriculture quietly script our deepest beliefs. He explains why polarisation thrives on a…
In this interview, I speak to Professor Jens Juul Holst — co-discoverer of GLP-1, the gut hormone now powering the most consequential drug class of the century. He talks about how a…
In this interview, I spoke to Nobel laureate Alvin Roth about his book Moral Economics and the repugnant transactions at its centre: exchanges willing parties want but others would ban. We discussed…
In this interview, I speak to Professor Andrés Velasco — Dean of LSE’s School of Public Policy, Chile’s former Finance Minister, and co-editor of The London Consensus. He argues that ideas, not…
In this interview I speak to Dr Leanne ten Brinke - an award-winning psychologist and associate professor at the University of British Columbia, where she directs the Truth and Trust Lab. Drawing…
In this interview I speak to Dr. Richard Socher — pioneer of neural NLP, inventor of widely used word vectors, and founder of You.com. He discusses his journey from contrarian Stanford researcher…
From the archive
The imposition of thingness and objecthood and selfhood and otherhood and motherhood is just our attempt to tell stories of a simple sort about how we best explain our universe. But our universe is obviously everything.
— Karl FristonDisorders of consciousness, and psychopathology generally, can now be viewed through the lens of false inference.
— Karl FristonThey are using language; I use language; I am conscious; therefore the machine is conscious. It is a very plausible inference to make.
— Karl FristonYou can simulate the weather in silico and it is not actually raining. The computer is not in and of itself wet, whereas mortal computation would actually be wet, if you physically realise what is going on.
— Karl FristonWe are all natural-born scientists, with exactly the same curiosity under the hood. That is the thing that needs to be installed in large language models before you will get anywhere near AGI.
— Karl FristonIf you do not have that, and large language models do not have that, then you do not know what you do not know. You cannot do belief updating. All you can do is produce outputs for any given input.
— Karl FristonYou can read natural selection as nature's way of doing Bayesian model selection at a very slow timescale.
— Karl FristonWe are glued to the world through our senses, and our sensory information entrains and informs the inversion process that can be read as perceptual inference.
— Karl FristonThe illusion, or hypothesis, that you are you is quite a unique gift and quite a fragile gift, and it can go away.
— Karl FristonYou don't know anything. It's all inference, including that you are you and that you exist.
— Karl FristonI'm not trying to craft a grand story so much as get stuff done.
— Dave PlummerI think, and I have thought for many months, or a year now, that this is as big as or bigger than the internet itself as a revolution in computing.
— Dave PlummerYou don't need a cult of personality. You need a whole lot of talented engineers working together, with good communication and collaboration, to produce a great product.
— Dave PlummerIf you're trying to fake that and compete with somebody who does it naturally, good luck.
— Dave PlummerI wasn't writing it to a spec, or for an imaginary customer. I was writing it for me.
— Dave PlummerIf you were going to give Leonardo da Vinci a CNC machine, would you do it when he was 17, or would you wait until he had already learned the craft? I think I would wait.
— Dave PlummerYou still need to be an engineer to do AI coding effectively, but now you need taste, which you didn't have to have before.
— Dave PlummerI was not looking for an excuse, but it served as a great explanation for a lot of things.
— Dave PlummerI always knew I was different, but I didn't think I was wrong.
— Dave PlummerRight now, I would say that AI on a constrained task is a better engineer than I am.
— Dave PlummerI also don't want our work to be part of a hype cycle that distracts from other issues.
— Susan SchneiderIt's imperative that we grapple with the questions: what is it to be sentient? What is it to be human? What is it to be intelligent?
— Susan SchneiderWe could potentially realise that consciousness extends beyond brains.
— Susan SchneiderI think major assumptions have to be backed by extraordinary science.
— Susan Schneider
