AI Snake Oil (Robert Wright & Arvind Narayanan)
Robert Wright's Nonzero
Nonzero
4.7 • 618 Ratings
🗓️ 2 October 2024
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
0:28 Arvind’s book and newsletter: AI Snake Oil 3:02 A taxonomy of AI observers 7:41 The impact of generative AI 20:21 Why predictive AI sometimes fails 25:03 Uses and misuses of AI in law and healthcare 41:22 Can social media be saved? 52:25 Heading to Overtime
Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Arvind Narayanan (Princeton University, AI Snake Oil). Recorded September 11, 2024.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to Robert Wright's Non-Zero podcast. You're listening to Robert Wright's Non-Zero Podcast. |
| 0:29.3 | Hi, Arvin. |
| 0:31.3 | Hi, Pop. |
| 0:32.6 | How you doing? |
| 0:34.1 | I'm doing well. |
| 0:35.1 | How are you? |
| 0:35.4 | I really look forward to chatting. |
| 0:37.1 | So do I. Very much so. Let me introduce this. I'm Robert Wright, publisher of the Non-Zero Newsletter. This is a non-zero podcast. You are Arvind Narayanan, a professor of computer science at Princeton, also director of Center for Information Technology Policy there. And also you have your own newsletter called AI Snake Oil. |
| 0:56.5 | I think you and I have probably agreed that people should subscribe to both of our newsletters, right? |
| 1:01.6 | I very much agree with that. |
| 1:03.2 | Yeah, even though you've never seen mine. |
| 1:05.3 | Be careful. You never know what you're endorsing. |
| 1:07.3 | Okay, so you also have a book called AI Snake Oil, same name, co-authored with Syash Kapoor. |
| 1:14.3 | I hope that's close to the pronunciation. |
| 1:17.1 | The subtitle is what artificial intelligence can do, what it can't, and how to tell the difference. |
| 1:23.1 | And that's what we're going to talk about. |
| 1:24.9 | I'm really looking forward to this. |
| 1:27.2 | Your book does a good job of conveying the breadth of the field of AI, you know, |
| 1:32.9 | because what's gotten the most attention over the last couple of years, |
| 1:36.7 | at least at the public level, is generative AI, |
| 1:40.7 | AI that generates images, videos, and, of, language, as with chat, GPT. |
| 1:46.3 | And one thing you emphasize in the book is that the field is a lot bigger than that. |
... |
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