Robert J. Marks II and Zoltan Istvan on the Promise — or Threat — of Artificial Intelligence
In this episode of Humanize, Wesley focuses on AI — artificial intelligence. Are we on the verge of an era if incalculable human progress because of the power of AI? Or are we threatened with being made obsolete and perhaps extinguished in an age of intelligent machines? Or, perhaps, a combination of both?
The program features two experts who have different perspectives on these issues.
Dr. Robert J Marks II is an AI enthusiast. An electrical engineer, Marks is the Distinguished Professor of Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Baylor University. His research supporters include NASA, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the National Institutes of Health, the Army Research Lab, and the Office of Naval Research. He has consulted for Microsoft, and Boeing, and has authored several books and hundreds of peer-reviewed journal and conference papers. He is also my colleague at the Discovery Institute where he is Director of the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence. His most recent book is Non-Computable You: What you do that Artificial Intelligence Never Will. He is also one of the editors of the new book, Minding the Brain: Models of the Mind, Information and Empirical Science.
Zoltan Istvan is perhaps the world’s foremost popularizer of transhumanism, who ran for president on the Transhumanist Party ticket in 2016, a time in which he made international headlines for touring the United States in a bus designed to look like a casket.
Istvan is a journalist, entrepreneur, political candidate, and futurist. Formerly a reporter for the National Geographic channel, and now writes philosophical, futurist, and politically-themed articles about transhumanism and AI for major media including the New York Times, Vice’s Motherboard, Wired, the Huffington Post, TechCrunch, and Newsweek. Istvan regularly appears on television and video channels discussing futurist and transhumanist-related topics. He is the author of The Transhumanist Wager, a philosophical science fiction novel, and he is the subject of a newly published biography entitled Transhuman Citizen: Zoltan Istvan’s Hunt for Immortality.
Robert J. Marks II | Discovery Institute
Non-Computable You: What You Do That Artificial Intelligence Never Will by Robert J. Marks | Amazon
Minding the Brain | Discovery Institute
Capitalism 2.0: the economy of the future will be powered by neural lace by Zoltan Istvan | Wired
Why Giving Rights to Robots Might One Day Save Humans by Zoltan Istvan | Newsweek
The Transhumanist Wager by Zoltan Istvan | Amazon
Transhuman Citizen: Zoltan Istvan’s Hunt for Immortality by Ben Murnane | Amazon