Ranging from the Terminator films,

I'll be back.

To the idea that chatbox and automation could replace humans in jobs such as

teaching, factories and investment. The fear of AI and the existential threat posed by it has been a huge talking point in the

media for the past two years.

But are those fears rational and what drives those fears?

It's a topic I speak to today with my guest, Professor Margaret Schwartz,

with Fordham University. Margaret, it's great to have you back on the show again. It's always a

privilege to speak with you. So the whole concept of AI has obviously caused a lot of consternation,

as many of us immediately assume this is some kind of existential threat to us.

Why do we view AI so suspiciously?

Any kind of technology when it's newly introduced, we make sense of it by telling stories

about it. And our culture

is full of stories, you know, of the machines taking over. But it's also full of helpful servant robots.

And so within that discourse, there's sort of an inability to see that AI, at least as it exists now, requires a lot of

human-like maintenance and oversight. One of the easiest ways to think about this is to look at

content moderation online, for example, which is something that is not done by algorithm.

The behind the screen by Sarah Roberts is about

the people who work kind of like factory shift type jobs on the Google campus or from home,

where they're paid, you know, in incremental amounts by click to go through content either that's been

flagged algorithmically or by other users and decide whether or not they're going to let it go.

And we sort of were starting to know about this.

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