We've been setting up email drips and campaigns for several years for our clients, but now a new competitor has emerged. In my interview with Chase Diamond today, we are going to debate the case for Chatbots versus email.

We discuss why James wrote this book 3 years ago now, how far away he really thinks we are from artificial human intelligence, the warning bells recently being sounded about artificial intelligence, and why he thinks there will not be another AI winter. Our guest today is James Barrat author of the book "Our final Invention" Artificial Intelligence and the end of the Human Era". It's good to be here. Kathleen Walch: [00:00:39] Great, I'd like to get started by having you introduce yourself to our listeners and to tell us a little bit about your book and also what additional things that you're doing in the field of AI and let's go from there. I got into artificial intelligence, or the study of artificial intelligence, and the critique of AI because I made a film about 17 years ago now about artificial intelligence. I interviewed Ray Kurzweil and Rodney Brooks and Arthur C. Clarke among others … and Ray Kurzweil of course who is now chief engineer at Google and the Google brain project.

I was speaking to my manager the other day over coffee and the conversation steered towards the topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI). While on that topic, he commented that, "In the field of AI, many people talk but don't deliver". While what he said was true in general, I feel that success or failure of AI projects are predetermined at the point of hiring. Over the past few months, I have been interviewing with various firms across different industries for data analyst, junior data scientist or AI engineer positions. While interviewing, I noticed many differences between these companies I interviewed for.

First off, I simply love the concept of Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning and all the technologies which work together within this space to make what I would consider a better world. I have spoken on previous shows about how I feel AI and Machine learning combined with Big Data will lead to things like the cure for cancer and other major breakthroughs in our lifetimes, and on today's show we explore the inner workings of the mind & brain from a neuroscience perspective. In my opinion, we are on the verge of some very significant innovations and exponential changes in the world of technology, and innovative organizations like Centiment.io Essentially creating what I would call a super-platform capable of determining the right person, at the right time when they are feeling the right way to place a personalized advertisement in front of the individual to exponentially increase the potential for a converted sale. Yes, that was a mouthful but it's really hard for me to say everything it can do without paraphrasing quotes below or getting to geek in my speak.

With the rise of new generation of generative models, it became possible to have really interesting conversations with algorithms. Fascinating because of the progress that has been done, scary because sometimes it's just too real. There's often no way we can distinguish'generated by AI' from'done by humans'. Should we worry about it? Here's my interview with Artificial Intelligence, question to answer, about the technology and the future of our world.

Not only do you have to convince other people that you can and should lead, but sometimes you have to convince yourself. That's not always easy for women, given that leadership has long been defined by how men act. Finding a style that's authentic and resonates with others requires reflection and patience. We talk to two leadership coaches about what distinguishes a leader, how to know if you're ready to be one, and how to best make the transition. Then our hosts discuss their own leadership journeys, and the Amys share tips with Nicole that they've learned along the way. Amy Jen Su and Muriel Maignan Wilkins are the founders of the executive coaching and leadership development firm Paravis Partners. They co-wrote the book Own the Room, and Amy is the author of The Leader You Want to Be. Sign up to get the Women at Work monthly newsletter. Our theme music is Matt Hill's "City In Motion," provided by Audio Network. AMY BERNSTEIN: I remember the first time I was really challenged to stop being, you know, a follower and be a leader. A colleague saw me in a context where I was supposed to be leading, and I evidently wasn't because she came up to me afterwards and she said, what are you waiting for? Who are you waiting to say, and now Amy is the leader? AMY BERNSTEIN: And you were, you were given every opportunity, and you just blew it. AMY BERNSTEIN: And she was so right. I mean, I felt like crap when she said it. But you know, that prompted a lot of soul-searching. AMY GALLO: And what did you do differently? AMY BERNSTEIN: I looked for opportunities to steer and to offer guidance. And instead of asking a question, I would offer my view, here's what I would recommend. It was really sort of a -- I had to switch the channel from being, you know, I guess I viewed myself as just one of many people on the team to taking ownership and recognizing that if this thing we were working on failed, I would be the one to blame. And it was really like that self-generated thing, where you realize that it's up to you to make it work. Making the transition from being one of many on a team, an individual contributor, a follower -- however you'd like to think of that role -- to being a leader is a process. It's a process of not just convincing other people to see us as leaders, but also of convincing ourselves that we can and should lead.

"The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing." These wise words of world-renowned business author Stephen Covey challenge each of us as we stand on the precipice of a new decade. But what's the'main thing' when navigating technology as we enter 2020? The simple answer is… Cybersecurity. As innovation explodes into every area of our lives, cybersecurity is providing the glue that can enable the good and disable the bad for implementing cutting-edge innovation as well as reducing risk from older vulnerabilities. We also see cybersecurity continue as the top priority for chief information officers (CIOs) in 2020, just as it has been for most of the past decade, with groups like the National Association of State CIOs (NASCIO). But even as cybersecurity solutions offer a way forward to ensure privacy protections are workable and effective, most people see the data breaches, ransomware, identity theft, denial-of-service attacks and other cyberattacks as proof that cybersecurity has become the Achilles Heel, not the savior, for new innovation. Even as exciting advances occur in artificial intelligence (AI), autonomous vehicles, 5G networks cloud computing, mobile devices and the Internet of Things (IoT), these same developments seem to cause negative societal disruptions that make daily news headlines. So what will happen next with cybersecurity? That's what this annual security prediction roundup will cover, from the perspective of the top cybersecurity industry companies, thought leaders, executives and journalists. Every year we catalogue the evaluators to see who has made a New Year's security prediction list and checked it twice.

In 1976, Francis Crick arrived at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, overlooking a Pacific Shangri-La with cotton candy skies and a beaming, blue-green sea. He had already won the Nobel Prize for co-discovering the double-helix structure of DNA, revealing the basis of life to be a purely physical, not a mystical, process. He hoped to do the same thing for consciousness. If matter was strange enough to explain a creature's life code, he thought, maybe it's strange enough to explain a creature's mind, too. For something that everybody walks around with everyday, consciousness wouldn't seem to be as immense a puzzle as the origin of the universe.

NIPS 2018 (Montreal, Canada), or NeurIPS, as it is called now, is over, and I would like to take the opportunity to dissect one of the papers that received the Best Paper Award at this prestigious conference. The name of the paper is Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (arXiv link) and its authors are affiliated to the famous Vector Institute at the University of Toronto. In this post, I will try to explain some of the main ideas of this paper as well as discuss their potential implications for the future of the field of Deep Learning. Since the paper is quite advanced and touches on concepts such as Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) or Normalizing Flows (NF), I suggest that you read up on these terms if you are not familiar with them, since I will not go into details on these. However, I will try to explain the ideas of the paper as intuitively as possible, so that you may get the main concepts without going too much into the technical details. If you are interested, you may read up on these details afterwards in the original paper.

Measuring the intelligence of AI is one of the trickiest but most important questions in the field of computer science. If you can't understand whether the machine you've built is cleverer today than it was yesterday, how do you know you're making progress? At first glance, this might seem like a non-issue. "Obviously AI is getting smarter" is one reply. "Just look at all the money and talent pouring into the field. Look at the milestones, like beating humans at Go, and the applications that were impossible to solve a decade ago that are commonplace today, like image recognition. How is that not progress?"