https://fixthenews.com/p/the-long-history-of-ai-from-descartes
"In 2024 we invited historian Ada Palmer onto our podcast to talk about the
history of progress. Ada is one of the world’s leading historians of the
Renaissance; when she talks about Machiavelli and Shakespeare it’s like they’re
old friends. But she's also an award-winning science fiction writer, spending
as much time imagining the future as she does studying the past.
If I had to put Ada in a box I’d label it “Time Traveller,” and at the end of
our first conversation, she said something we just couldn’t shake. “The world
doesn’t stay saved. That’s the story of the last 150 years. We saved the world
a couple of times. Now we have to save the world again.”
She was one of our favourite ever guests, and, it seems, our listeners too;
that episode received more downloads than almost anything we’d ever released.
So when Ada reached out earlier this year with an idea for a new podcast
series, it was easy to say yes.
A Short History of Saving the World is the latest addition to the
Fix The
News podcast network. Each month, Ada and Gus take one of the big questions of
our time and explore it through the lens of history: not to rehash the past,
but to use the long view as a way of understanding the present.
This month’s episode, “I Think, Therefore AI?” begins with a question that
feels impossible to escape right now: What is consciousness?
From Richard Dawkins and Descartes to
Astro Boy, Silicon Valley and ChatGPT,
it’s a fascinating conversation about artificial intelligence, empathy and
what it means to be human."
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
