AI Safety with Shazeda Ahmed

Overthink

Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D.

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Education

4.7 • 549 Ratings

🗓️ 9 April 2024

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Welcome your robot overlords! In episode 101 of Overthink, Ellie and David speak with Dr. Shazeda Ahmed, specialist in AI Safety, to dive into the philosophy guiding artificial intelligence. With the rise of LLMs like ChatGPT, the lofty utilitarian principles of Effective Altruism have taken the tech-world spotlight by storm. Many who work on AI safety and ethics worry about the dangers of AI, from how automation might put entire categories of workers out of a job to how future forms of AI might pose a catastrophic “existential risk” for humanity as a whole. And yet, optimistic CEOs portray AI as the beginning of an easy, technology-assisted utopia. Who is right about AI: the doomers or the utopians? And whose voices are part of the conversation in the first place? Is AI risk talk spearheaded by well-meaning experts or investor billionaires? And, can philosophy guide discussions about AI toward the right thing to do?

Check out the episode's extended cut here!

Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence
Adrian Daub, What Tech Calls Thinking
Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality
Mollie Gleiberman, “Effective Altruism and the strategic ambiguity of ‘doing good’”
Matthew Jones and Chris Wiggins, How Data Happened
William MacAskill, What We Owe the Future
Toby Ord, The Precipice
Inioluwa Deborah Raji et al., “The Fallacy of AI Functionality”
Inioluwa Deborah Raji and Roel Dobbe, “Concrete Problems in AI Safety, Revisted”
Peter Singer, Animal Liberation
Amia Srinivisan, “Stop The Robot Apocalypse”

Support the show

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Overthink.
0:12.1	The podcast where two philosophy professors talk about how our discipline has lots of rich tools for helping us think about contemporary issues.
0:20.5	I am your co-host, David Pena-Gusman.
0:23.1	And I'm co-host, Ellie Anderson.
0:25.5	David, the U.S. State Department recently commissioned a report about how AI employees feel
0:33.7	about the safety of their work and the incentives driving it.
0:38.1	And let's just say the report was not particularly positive.
0:42.0	It turns out that a lot of people working in the field of AI have a lot of concerns about
0:48.7	its safety.
0:49.9	Yeah.
0:50.5	And the fact that it's coming from people who work in this industry, I think, is
0:55.0	particularly telling indicator of the fact that the general population, ourselves included,
1:01.4	don't really know the full extent of the risks that are associated with these new technologies.
1:07.5	It's kind of similar to, you know, all the people who work for places like Facebook that
1:11.4	don't allow their children on social media because they know just how addictive it is.
1:17.4	So the fact that the people with knowledge of the inside are the ones that are, you know,
1:21.5	racing the red flag should be a sign that we should pay attention to this a little bit more.
1:26.5	Yeah, the authors of the report
1:27.8	that I mentioned spoke with over 200 experts for it, including employees at OpenAI, Google,
1:34.0	Deep Mind, meta, and Anthropic. And these are AI labs that are working towards what's known as
1:39.6	artificial general intelligence. Now, the term AI is a very odd one, like artificial intelligence,
1:47.3	but the basic idea is that techies are working to create a simulation of the intelligence
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D., and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D. and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.