YouSaid · the spoken record

Junaid Mubeen

lines on the record: 52
first: 2022-06-13
most recent: 2022-06-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think so, or at least siblings, if anyone is uncomfortable with the presumed hierarchy there, at least a sibling that can just rein them in, call out poor behaviors, question them, and just make sure that we're going on that learning journey with them.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What you think you should say next or how you should conduct yourself at the dinner table or whatever it may be. That would be deeply irresponsible form of parenting, would it not? We have to act as filters. We have to act as a guide to be able to help them filter out the mistruths and abuse of content and so on. And it just seems that that almost goes against the grain of what these models are trying to achieve today, which is to kind of set them loose, to free them of constraints, and then to just see what they come up with. Strikes me as very reckless and as I say, just not very sensible from a pedagogical perspective.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lives should undergo the scrutiny of human questioning. Now, we're able to do this in many other contexts. We are naturally very curious. We demonstrate this as children. And it was actually one of the early pioneers of AI and ensuring that said that for him the most sensible path to AI isn't to just develop it in one swoop, which is what the current approach is very much based on, but to actually develop a childlike AI and then just expose it to the world and through a course of education have it learn about the world. And if you think about how we educate AIs today, it is antithetical to everything we know about good teaching, about pedagogy. You would never think, I hope, to send a child off to the internet, even if they had the ability to do this and say, go and just swallow the entire contents of Wikipedia or Reddit or 4chan. Just swallow it all and then just take your best guess.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely, and especially in relation to artificial intelligence, one of the things that the field really suffers from at the moment is a real lack of transparency in how these tools work. So it seems that they're intelligent. To some people, it seems like they're sentient. But actually ask a fundamental question like how these things behave. What's actually happening underneath the hood? And it's very hard to get a lucid account because there's an incredible amount of abstraction and complexity to them. And I think it's very important that we retain our most sort of childlike instincts of being able to ask questions and not least questions of these entities that we proclaim to be intelligent. And especially when we come up against gray areas, when we come up against ethical questions like how to deploy self-driving cars or how an algorithm might be used to determine the length of a prison centence, anything that impacts on our data.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Entity that can somehow combine all of those perspectives into a coherent and comprehensive whole. And that's ultimately what I think sets the human brain apart for now at least.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Much to just the versatility that we have that our human brain has and our ability to navigate different types of problems, it stands in contrast to computers which really have these sabot-like capabilities in very narrow areas. There are some models emerging that are starting to solve multiple types of problems at once. But whenever you hear this term artificial general intelligence, remember that for humans, that refers to arability to go through life and navigate innumerable problems of very different kinds. And it all comes from a single underlying brain structure. Whereas what you have with artificial intelligence today is lots of different models. It's like having thousands of different brains each train on a very particular problem taught to see the world in a very particular way. And what's far less clear to me is how you develop a single”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That we're very maneuvable as humans. So, those people that say they can't do math, I mean, even if that's true to whatever degree, the encouragement for humans should be just our incredible versatility and our ability to pick things up. So we are able to somehow transfer what we learn in one area of life and transfer it elsewhere. I remember I had driver anxiety when I was taking driving lessons many years ago. And the way I got through that was to try to sort of imagine driving as a problem to be solved with a multivariable problem with lots of moving parts. And I managed to get there. And I'd like to think that my training in mathematics kind of endowed me with the mental models to then be able to become a barely competent but competent enough driver. And so neuroplasticity speaks very”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And figure out which ones actually do represent something meaningful and which one is just a spurious correlation. And I'll mention one more, which is, you know, we are naturally inquisitive. We ask questions, a quote somewhere in the book that young kids ask around 40,000 questions between the ages of two and five. I can pretty much validate that because I have a three-year-old and she's one on the way to hitting that threshold. And so the emphasis there is as much on answering questions and problem solving and figuring out what questions are interesting to ask in the first place. And mathematics owes a huge debt of gratitude to people that have just mused over these questions and puzzles that seem innocuous to begin with. Often they seem trivial. But in solving those problems, it then opens up our minds to whole new vistas of mathematical thought. And it seems to me that curiosity”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whereas humans have a sense of whether a calculation is meaningful, whether an answer is plausible, whether it's roughly correct. And so there's an example of where we just tend to think in fuzzier terms. And precision only goes so far. Or the fact that computers are undeniably better than humans at pattern matching. And I've often seen maths described as the science of patterns. Finding patterns is part of what it means to do maths. But as a mathematician, And actually as a human, you will find patterns everywhere. We're just drawn to them. And it's how we're so easily misled by magicians, by advertisers, because we can't help but connect the dots, even when those patterns are spurious. And what mathematics offers us is an instrument to separate meaningful patterns from misleading ones. And that's the instrument of mathematical proof and rigor. So the human brain is able to kind of sort through these different patterns.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the book sets out seven principles of mathematical intelligence because I think there are lots of ways to address that question. We all have our own vantage point. Mine just happens to be from mathematics. So I'll answer that question through the lens of mathematics because you can take the various principles of the book and they are somewhat of a complement to the way that computers think. So the first principle is estimation. Computers can calculate very precisely, ask them to compute compute two numbers and they will.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's why we're very selective, aren't we, about the things that we share with our children? We want to make sure that they learn in manageable chunks. And we also want to make sure that there's a degree of exploration so they can go and figure things out for themselves, that they can make mistakes, and they don't just get everything given to them in one fell swoop.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, I mean, I wrote this book while. Having two kids, and it undoubtedly shaped some of my perspectives because it's a reminder of just how organic learning is. And there is this temptation to just swallow a pill, design a pill that you can just swallow and just amass the contents of the internet. But why would you want to do that? I mean, it would probably make your brain explode because we're just not equipped. It's just not a very sensible approach. Even if you had The brain capacity to do that, you wouldn't have the means to be able to kind of separate the signal from the noise.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are certain terms that you'll decidedly reject. I think earlier you made a point not to use the word iconic when referring to countdown. I'm not sure a chatbot would bother very much about those distinctions. And it's very subjective, right? But I appreciate that. I hope I'm not outed you there, but I appreciate that you have your own style and approach. And I think I would worry that with the chatbot it's just like I'm feeding responses into a generic interface and I'm not sure you'd get the best out of me as a result.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To source your next question. I think. I think the challenge with these tools is that even as they exhibit impressive behaviors, Let's say 90% of the time, and let's say 90% becomes 99%. Chances are at some point in the interview, you're going to ask me a question or say something that is just utterly ridiculous. Because you have no sense of the world. You have no common sense. You have no ability to reason your way through things. The way language works, the way language develops is through a social context. It doesn't work by swallowing the entire contents of the internet and then predicting what you think should come next in a conversation. Language is far more organic than that. We're very sensitive to the words that we use. We don't want to offend one another.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think my tone would certainly be different because to me right now there's something very authentic about this. As far as I know, Ros, you are a royal person with sentience. And these questions are coming from a place of genuine curiosity. I think that authenticity is what drives these kinds of dialogues. It's why I enjoy listening to podcasts between two humans. The moment you're substituted for a chat bot, now I'm wondering who am I really talking to or what am I really talking to? Because you seem intelligent. You're the chatbot. This is chatbot Ross now. You seem intelligent. You seem to have to ask these fairly probing questions, but you don't really care. There's nothing underneath the hood. So I'm not sure how willing I am to give a truly honest account of myself, knowing that in the end, all you're really doing is using a pattern matching algorithm.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Content from all the stuff that's automatically generated. And I think as artists, we should all embrace the notion that in the future we're going to have to work harder to produce stuff that is demonstrably not the work of a processing machine.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dispatching one proof after another. But that's not really the measure of the experience. Mathematicians are far more romantic than that. When you ask mathematicians how they arrived at an insight, it's far more mysterious. It's not so easy to pin down. And their goal quite often is to inspire the reader, to show them not only that something has been demonstrated as true, but to offer them a real insight, some real wisdom as to why that thing is true. And I think these will be the differentiators for us humans. And that's no bad thing to kind of force us to raise our game as writers, as mathematicians, as artists of all stripes, and to recognize that our contribution isn't just to produce stuff. There's a lot of stuff out there at the moment. And it's a dizzying place to then kind of navigate that terrain and separate out genuinely good, meaningful human.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Facts, but the soul of the fact will escape them. And I think one of the potential advantages of these technologies is that it will force us to really examine what we bring to the table. And if it is just presenting cold summaries of things, there's an argument that that really is something we should automate. Just as I would never think to employ a human on the basis of their calculation skills alone, I've got the tools for that. Why would you employ a writer who only presents the bare facts of something? But I mention that particular example of war because there's a human dimension to that. There's a degree of subjectivity perhaps, but also there's something very experiential about that analysis that you wouldn't want to lose. And I think this is true even within mathematics, that there are ways of just seeing mathematics as very formulaic, just mechanistically working your way through the”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“War. I would want to know that that summary is coming from somebody who has some connection with the front line of that, who's ideally out there engaging with what's happening on the ground. And that their summary of what's happening is very much shaped by their sensory motor experience, by what they're seeing, what they're hearing. The idea that I would have that replaced by a computer that is thousands and miles away from battle and is simply going on what they're reading on the internet and trying their best to digest it. To me, there is a distinction to be made there. So if I want the bare facts of something, I can see where these technologies might make their case. If I want, and there's a great quote from Henri Poincar ⁇, a French mathematician from just over 100 years ago, he says that computers or machines can take hold of the best.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We should certainly be aware of what's happening and what's coming. So these language models that have been slightly disparaging about, they are able to now replicate and even supersede humans on a wider range of tasks. As a journalist, imagine if your job was to present An update of”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Naturally, to computers, so I think they're absolutely going to be essential if we're to rein in AI and find our own place alongside computers, the way in which we can be productive and proactive in shaping how these technologies behave is to reconnect with our human capabilities. But the maths curriculum is very stubborn, hasn't really evolved all that much in the past 150 years. Obviously, it goes through different iterations, but it still has calculation and memorization at its core. And it's a very odd thing to focus on as a human being.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we will see a need in the future. I think employees are already calling out the fact that the skills that students are entering the workforce with need to be dramatically updated because they're trained for so many years to perform calculation after calculation after calculation. And then you come into the workforce and you're presented with problems that just carry a degree of unpredictability and uncertainty. The data tends to be very messy. It's not always obvious what question you should be asking. And so these are the types of skills that we should be promoting from a very young age, the skill of curiosity and the ability to ask interesting questions, the ability not just to be able to perform calculations, but actually ground them within meaningful context to develop a sense of what's reasonable. These are also capabilities, by the way, that don't come so”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think what we have seen in the past decades even, even before this recent surge in AI, is that the kind of mathematics that we do in industry is now so much more diversified because of the tools we now have available. I can't imagine doing much of Myro 20, 30 years ago, the ability not only to be able to run calculations, but to set up models, to be able to run different types of software to analyze different data sets. That just allows, it freezes up, it alleviates that mental burden of actually doing the processing and it freezes up to then do the things that we do best, which is ask meaningful questions, make sense of the results that are coming out of these calculations. And I think...”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think people see through it and they're just not buying it. It's good for winning game shows, but not so much for finding your place in society.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, really, what's the point? Where am I going to use this in the real world? And I think it's because we've hit a 99% of what the subject has to offer because we've kind of missed a forest for the trees in realizing the true power of mathematics lies as a thinking system. And it's very unfortunate that we've fixated on a set of skills that maybe at one point in history held some currency. The original computers were human. You were paid for your facility to carry out long tedious calculations and to be able to do that precisely. We don't have human computers anymore. And yet the school curriculum, and this isn't just true of the UK, this is something I've seen globally. It's set up as if to assume that electronic computers don't exist and that it's humans that will still be relied upon for these skills of precise calculation. And it just isn't true.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Numbers more holistically in terms of approximation. We have a rough idea of how large things are. And in terms of our eye for precision, that kind of expires at around three or four objects. And so we've decided to fixate on a small handful of skills that firstly represent a very tiny sliver of the subject are not portrayed in the most illuminating ways. It's just a bunch of symbols to be processed. We're expected to do them at speed and it's a handful of skills that not only are very unnatural to us, but we're also very easily”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're turned off by school mets. When people say, I can't do maths or I don't like maths, I hear that as I don't like food. Can't do it, can't do food. And of course you can have your preferences, your palate will be more inclined towards certain items on a menu. But the idea that you just dismiss food in its entirety, that would be seen as slightly strange and probably something that's worth looking into. And that's what I hear when people say they can't do math. But what they mean, of course, is that they can't do school maths. And that really means performing calculations at speed, memorizing and regurgitating formulas and equations. And I think part of the reason it's so off-putting is because it's not something we're naturally wired to do. These are not skills that come naturally to humans. We are naturally wired to think of”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mathematicians and even lay people can arrive at a consensus on what beauty entails. So it's not just in the eye of the beholder. It's not just this subjective thing, but you can show people different types of arguments and they're just drawn to very particular styles of mathematical argument. So for example, if you show people a visual argument versus a purely symbolic one, we're quite naturally drawn to visual arguments as a kind of aha moment that comes with that. You can see how all the pieces fit together. And so I hope I persuaded you that there is something to that. And at the very least that when we speak of the beauty and satisfaction that the art springs, that there is a bit of that to mathematics as well.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they did some brain scanning and found that when mathematicians claim to experience beauty, it excites the same areas of the brain as music and art. So actually there is an aesthetic quality to mathematics that renders it as much of an art as a science. And there are even studies more recently than that showing that”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there are a few things I can point to. So the psychologist Alison Gotnick about 20 years ago, I think it was, she suggested that having a good explanation for something, she wasn't referring to Matt in particular, but having a good explanation is akin to having an orgasm. She's not the only one that has mused as such Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called father of the atomic bomb. He said that understanding is a lot like sex. He said it's got a practical purpose, but that's not why people do it normally. And so it's really speaking to this intrinsic drive that mathematics has. And there are studies. There's a study out of UCL a few years ago that suggests that the way that mathematicians experience beauty in their subjects, you'll hear this routinely, mathematicians finding different ideas beautiful.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or where we have numbers that you can multiply by themselves to give you a negative number. These are rule-defying ideas that give rise to whole new branches of mathematics. And it's not something that's obviously encoded into the capabilities of computers.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have differing interpretations of the rules. And however frustrating that is, it does reveal something about our human nature because you can't imagine robots sitting around to play a game of monopoly and leveling these accusations at each other. They're going to operate within whatever rules they're prescribed. They're probably going to play the game very well. They're going to come up with different strategies. But they would never think to accuse one another of tinkering with the rules. And yet tinkering with the rules and even breaking the rules is such a big part of what it means to do mathematics. And I know that sounds strange to many people because at school you're taught. You've just got to follow the rules. Learn the rules, regurgitate them when the exam comes around. And yet so much of the most useful mathematics that we have today arises when we...”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think how vulnerability is what makes us so entertaining. I mean, I remember watching, I've seen certain tennis matches, whenever Nadal plays Djokovic, you feel like you're watching two players that are playing at the peak of their powers. But what makes those contests fascinating is those periods where their level starts to drop, those vulnerabilities start to kick in. I think that's what makes sports so enticing. You can train for years to achieve these ridiculous levels of performance, but then occasionally you're sort of brought back down to the level of mere mortals. There's another element to human-to-human competition, which is that we're not always honest. The game I mentioned in the book that the game of monopoly is just frankly forbidden in my house because my wife has observed that I just can't get along with her siblings when we play monopoly. We've heard all kinds of accusations at each other because”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Still, find motivation to do these things, we're just intrinsically motivated. And while some people may sort of take umbrage at the idea that games like Chess and Go remain a pursuit worthy of humans, I think they should always be a place for us to just have a go at puzzles even when the answer is known. I mean, I've not yet done today's wordle, but I will do at some point, even though I know that probably millions of people across the world have figured it out already, but there's still an intrinsic satisfaction for me to figure out my own sort of path to that solution. So I think automation doesn't necessarily signal the end of human pursuit.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Countdown is a very easy game for computers to master because there are only finitely many possibilities in a letters round or a numbers round. And I practice on a web, I used to practice on a website that was actually developed by my main rival on the show, the person I played in the final. And he developed these bots and he set these bots at different levels. And one of these bots was basically set to play the perfect games that he would never miss the highest possible word. It would always solve the numbers game and it would always get the conundrum within a second. So in order to beat this spot, you had to basically play 15 perfect rounds of countdown, which some players can do, by the way. Some players have managed to get to the point where they hardly ever miss a beat. But there is something to be said there that even in these pursuits where computers do acquire that mastery and kind of put as humans to slaughter.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Connection. So it's not something you can very easily do in 30 seconds. And if you're limiting yourself to the kinds of questions that can be answered in 30 seconds, you're just not going to get very interesting questions. They're going to be fairly close questions with a clear method and a clear right answer. And that's not really the kind of questions that mathematicians spend much of their days ruminating on. So countdown, it has to be said, was a very positive distraction for me while I was doing my PhD, but it is a very poor representation of what it means for a mathematician to do maths.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Full of rules that might help you along your way. But it's by playing the game, seeing different patterns, understanding the conceptual structures that underpin numbers. And that's what ultimately gives them that speed, that ability to solve these problems within 30 seconds. But quite frankly, speed is overrated. And maths should never really be thought of as a game show. If you think about the expectations of students at school, it's a glorified game show, except it's just not quite as glamorous in that you have to sit an exam at the end of a course of study. You have to answer a certain number of questions within a certain amount of time. So you're constantly against the clock. There's a rule juxtaposition between that style of doing maths and the mathematics that's done by mathematicians and indeed math enthusiasts where time is very rarely of the essence. Mathematicians will routinely slow down. They'll step away from a problem. They'll give themselves every opportunity to find that novel.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so when I last appeared on countdown, I was actually doing my PhD in mathematics at the same time. And the perception that my friends and family had of what I did on a day-to-day basis in my PhD was that I was solving bigger and bigger equations or that I was just adding really large numbers when actually nothing could be further from the truth. There are very few numbers in my dissertation at all. And so I do feel some cognitive dissonance in the fact that I appeared on this show had a great time doing it, but in many ways it was the worst possible advert of my skills. But there is an irony to countdown, which is if you were to look at how countdowners, how the best contestants learn their craft, they learn it by the way they become really good at the numbers game isn't by absorbing a whole bunch of number facts. I mean, there's a small...”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now there's this other brand of mathematics that I espouse in the book it's the mathematics that I've experienced for the best part of 20 years now. And it's far more creative in its scope. And so this book on the one hand is an attempt to showcase these creative dimensions of maths, but is set in this urgent backdrop of AI because as you say, I think so much of the fear that we have around AI is rooted in this perception that it can do these things that represent the highest forms of intelligence when actually from a mathematician's point of view, the capabilities of these technologies while undeniably impressive, they only represent a tiny sliver of what it means to think mathematically. And as for some of those creative dimensions that I speak through, these technologies aren't yet at the point where they're able to assume those skills. It's very premature to assume that they will.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. So, I think there are two brands of mathematics. One, as you say, is school maths, and then the other is mathematics as it's practiced by mathematicians and math enthusiasts. Now, Meth is the only subject that I know of where people will declare so adamantly that they can either do it or they can't. If you say you can, you know, I could never do history or I could never do the language arts. bizarre and to be proud of such a thing too. And yet in maths, people do this very readily. And I think it's because when people think of maths, they think about the way that it happens to be represented in the curriculum. Anna has to be said the wider media, where it's a sprawling mess of symbols. It's very dull. It's not particularly inspiring. It's fairly comprehensive.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then I worry about how we're going to orient ourselves through these technologies in the years to come as they widen their capabilities.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To rein them in when they overreach. I can't see who's going to do that, if not as humans. And even within my subjective mathematics, which on the surface is about rules and logic, and you might think it's right for automation, so much of the enterprise of mathematical thinking is creative and encompasses aspects of thinking that are really beyond the purview of what these technologies are even trying to achieve at the moment. So my concern isn't that these technologies will definitely subsume our human capabilities. I think there's a possibility that will happen in the distant future. My bigger concern is that we're going to see the surface level capabilities and throw in the towel because we ascribe the qualities of intelligence, of sentience to these technologies. And if we're prepared to do that now on the basis of autocomplete function,”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My concern is that we raise the white flag prematurely because we see these technologies doing things that undoubtedly impressive. The pattern matching skills of these technologies are unprecedented. And in terms of being able to crunch through data and analyze patterns, there's much that computers can now do that humans can't get close to. If you play the game of chess or the game of good, you have to reckon with the fact that you're never now going to, as a human, you're never going to reach the level of a computer. Lee C. Doll, the 18-time Go champion, retired a few years ago after he was beaten by Alpha Go and he saw the rapid advance of these technologies. He realized that, in his words, AI is an entity that cannot be defeated. So it doesn't sound good, but we need to remember the world is a lot more complicated than these toy problems that these technologies have seen success in. It's a lot messier. And we need someone or some agents to be able to work through that mess and actually make meaning of how these technologies behave.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think that is very dangerous. And we've seen some of the consequences in terms of how that undermines democracies and how it deepens divisions within society, how it's created polarized society and kept us trapped in our filter bubbles. So I'm very much concerned about the present day threats of AI more so than I am about that it's speculated threats in the future.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we're now at a point where these technologies are sophisticated enough to not only spread misinformation, but actually give us the tools to create them. So synthetic media like Deepfakes are a direct outgrowth of these same deep learning technologies. And we are increasingly finding it difficult to separate truths from mistruths, genuine honest to God content from content that's been fabricated. And these aren't distinctions that today's deep learning technologies are able to make. They're not really designed to sort of sift through the data they've been trained on and figure out what's genuinely true versus what is just patently false. And that's why I suggest that there's an ethic of free speech absolutism here. The idea that anything goes, we're living in this post-world now where these technologies will fail to discriminate between all types of data.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“of prejudices and biases that arise through these models. And it also comes from the fact that the data that's collected and fed into these models tends to be very limited. So if you have voice recognition software that is predominantly trained on male voices, it's going to find it harder to pick up the voice of females. If you have image recognition software that's predominantly trained on white people, it's going to come up with very strange and controversial ways of characterizing people of color. And so we need to think very carefully about how these technologies impact on different groups and how we make sure that it doesn't deepen the divides that already exist in society. I also think AI already has a lot to answer for in terms of how it has enabled and perpetuated the spread of misinformation.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be looking at the lack of diversity within the field, the fact that much of the thinking that's currently going into AI, much of the investment, is disproportionately focused on a very narrow set of beliefs from a very small number of people that happen to share a certain worldview. It's a worldview that is very much aligned to free speech absolutism, this idea that we just need to pump more and more data into these models. And as long as we've got enough data and enough processing power, then through a scale, we will resolve everything there is to resolve around intelligence. It's a particular worldview, but it's one that doesn't represent the full scope of human belief. And so what you then see is any number of...”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Advocating for lines of code. I struggle with the concept myself. I think Need to devote every ounce of energy we have to. Loving our fellow human. Making sure that our own rights are safeguarded. There are any number of threats to. Equity and social justice that are posed by these technologies. That's where And convince us that they had done so, not just because they appeared to be conscious, but because they'd actually somehow convinced us that there really was a living entity under the hood. Then I think this would become a very reasonable question, just as there are very reasonable discussions to be had around animal rights. But we're not there yet. My fear is that we're going to prematurely engage in those discussions at the expense of the other present day ethical conversations that we should be having around these technologies.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a degree to which that's impressive, and I'm sure that we'll have wide-ranging applications. But it's a step removed to saying that that represents any kind of degree of self-awareness, that this is an entity that has any perception of its own existence. It's just statistics on steroids, and it's very important that we're able to call out this. This illusion, we're going to see this more and more behaviors that feel intelligent, feel sentient because they're imitating humans more and more. There's still a huge burden of proof to demonstrate that there is any. Self awareness And there's no reason to believe that there will be just by virtue of these pattern matching algorithms.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think so. I think this is all, I think it's all an illusion because the way these models are trained is that they're fed huge tones of human generated data. They're essentially swallowing. The entire contents of the internet or getting close to doing that anyway. And then they're given a string of text, like a prompt. They're then making statistical correlations in order to predict what should come next. So the best interpretation of what's going on is that this model has Consumed all this information, and now it's doing its best to predict what a human would say next in that situation.”
2022-06-13 · Intelligence Squared · Count your Blessings: The Natural Beauty of Mathematics, with Junaid Mubeen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT