In this episode, Kieren and Riku kick off the new year by exploring the pitfalls of mass AI adoption, noting that chatbots like ChatGPT now have over 800 million weekly users. They discuss recent usage reports that analyse how the world is actually using these tools, contrasting short-term productivity gains with the dangers of "cognitive offloading" and the homogenization of creative work. Tune in for a guide on how to stop treating AI as an oracle and instead leverage it as a co-pilot that augments rather than replaces human thought.

Birds for Scale, Smarties is licensed under CC BY-SA.

Local Forecast – Elevator by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under CC BY.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Kieren and Riku get a guided tour of Isambard-AI – the UK’s most powerful supercomputer, ranked 11th most powerful and 4th greenest in the world – with Professor Simon McIntosh-Smith and Dr Emma Rose from the Bristol Centre for Supercomputing. They explore how national-scale AI really runs, what all that compute is used for in areas like health and finance, and why building this kind of sovereign AI infrastructure matters for the UK’s future.

Birds for Scale, Smarties is licensed under CC BY-SA.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Kieren and Riku tackle the polarising question of whether AI deserves legal rights and if consciousness is actually the right metric to use. Joined by Dr. Miranda Mowbray, an AI ethics expert from the University of Bristol, they explore the dangers of anthropomorphisation and reveal how even malware could pass certain tests for consciousness. They examine fascinating legal precedents where non-living entities, from corporations and rivers to religious idols, already hold rights, and discuss how these frameworks might close the accountability gap for autonomous systems. Tune in to discover why granting rights to AI might really be about protecting humans, and how the public can help shape future regulation

Birds for Scale, Smarties is licensed under CC BY-SA.

Local Forecast – Elevator by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under CC BY.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.