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Thanks for checking out the Nik Hawks Show, where my general mandate is to follow the pursuit of excellence. 

My background is in business, adventure, the military, athletic challenges, and working with world class athletes.

Those are all starting points for my guests, though not always.  I've talked to cryptographers, sleep scientists, authors, reporters, climbers, and adventurers.

All of them have useful insight for YOU, which is the reason I make the show public.  

Whether we're talking about cryptocurrency or rowing a boat across the Atlantic, my idea was to share the conversations I was having with radical people.  Lately I've been adding in my own thoughts in separate Nik-i-sodes.

HISTORY

I started this podcast in 2014, but it wasn't called The Nik Hawks Show. My wife Lee and I own the company Paleo Treats, so I called the show the Paleo Treats Podcast.

Over the course of 50+ episodes it became apparent that the podcast didn’t really have anything to do with Paleo. Sometime around episode 58, based on feedback from listeners and iTunes reviews, I decided to change the name to reflect what I was actually talking about.

That should catch you up to speed for now.  

To read more, find the latest episodes and news along with a way to support this show, please visit my site nikhawks.com

Thanks for listening!

Nik Hawks

Feb 7, 2016

I've been curious about AI, or Artificial Intelligence, for a few years now.  I read with interest the opposing points of view in Pedro Domingos The Master Algorithm and Nick Bostrum's Superintelligence regarding how quickly machines are approaching human capacities for general intelligence vs what's called "narrow learning", or the ability to operate in one very small segment of a problem but to do it exceedingly quickly.

This show brings an industry insider in the person of Chris Nicholson to talk about what's going on with AI right now, what it can do, and what it can't. 

Chris is a co-founder of Skymind, a company built to help organizations who are not particularly "geeky" build their own AI for their tasks using the well known and very popular computer language Java.  There are many flavors of AI, but Skymind is focused on what's called "deep learning", or the ability for a machine to teach itself to get better.

Sounds scary, but after hearing Chris walk you through the state of AI I think you'll be much more excited and hopeful than worried about our future.

In this conversation we talk about machine learning, hadoop, smal data, intrepretability, and dimensions of intelligence. All interesting stuff for those of us relatively unversed in the world of AI, enjoy the show!