Artificial Intelligence – Part Two – Skynet’s the limit

Origin Story

Podmasters

Society & Culture, News, News Commentary, History

4.8 • 655 Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2024

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The final episode of our two-part story of Artificial Intelligence. Having looked at the emergence and development of AI in part one we now turn to the future and assess the dangers and possibilities it raises. We weigh up two arguments concerning existential risk. Some AI theorists believe the technology has the possibility of becoming sentient and then behaving against humanity's interests. Others worry that it will simply deliver disastrous outcomes on the basis of badly established requests. For instance, if you ask a highly advanced machine to create paperclips, with no additional restrictions, it might end up killing everyone in its relentless pursuit of its task. Are either of these ideas remotely believable? Are they remotely likely? Then we look at the possible repercussions of more modest outcomes. What happens when everyone on earth is equipped with their own genius machine, which can assess global corporate law in seconds, or make millions on Amazon Marketplace? Will we use it for good or ill? (Spoilers: It'll be bad) How confidently can we accept the predictions of AI theorists? Are they really right that this is all inevitable? Or is history, and technological development, far more chaotic and unpredictable than their models allow? Finally, we look at the impact on humanity as we are all suddenly enveloped in AI art. Will an AI song ever move us to tears? And if so, what does that say about who we are and what we look for in the world? Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon. Reading List Books Susie Alegre - Human Rights, Robot Wrongs: Being human in the age of AI (2024) Nick Bostrom – Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014) Daniel Crevier – AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence (1993) Pedro Domingos - The Master Algorithm: How the quest for the ultimate learning machine will remake the world (2015) Max Fisher - The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World (2022) Walter Isaacson – The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (2014) Dorian Lynskey – Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World (2024) John Markoff - Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots (2015) David G. Stork (ed.) – HAL’s Legacy: 2001’s Computer as Dream and Reality (1997) Mustafa Suleyman with Michael Bhaskar – The Coming Wave: AI, Power and Our Future (2023) Michael Woolridge – The Road to Conscious Machines: The Story of AI (2021) Articles Alan Turing – ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, Mind (1950) Brad Darrach – ‘Meet Shaky, the First Electronic Person’, Life (1970) Jeremy Bernstein – ‘A.I.’, New Yorker (1981) Raffi Khatchadourian – ‘The Doomsday Invention’, New Yorker (2015) For the full reading list join our Patreon. Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, welcome to origin story. In each episode, we take a word, idea or figure from history,
0:13.4	explain its origins and talk about how it influences political discourse today. I'm Doreen
0:17.7	Linsky, author of the Ministry of Truth, Everything Must Go, and the Origin
0:21.1	Storybooks. And my name is Ian Dud. I'm a columnist with the I newspaper, and I also write the origin
0:25.5	story books. So welcome to part two of AI in part one. We did a history of the field of AI, which
0:33.0	began in 1956, and also the fears of AI, which predate it and go back to at least Mary Shelley's
0:40.0	Frankenstein.
0:41.2	So in this episode, we're going to dig into sort of where we are now and some of the sort
0:47.2	of big questions about, you know, what AI is doing to us.
0:52.2	And as I said at the end of the last episode, the very teeny tiny question of,
0:56.9	what does it mean to be human?
0:58.7	Which, just to be clear,
1:00.5	will be resolved by the end of the episode
1:02.6	in a really pithy one sentence summary.
1:04.7	Yeah, and then you'll go,
1:05.7	oh, that's what it means to be human.
1:07.6	Thanks, thanks, guys.
1:09.4	I might become a patron.
1:12.4	That's good value.
1:19.3	Yeah, we should maybe make that patrons only. Stick a little paywall in front of what it means to be human. Yeah, I mean, you would pay, wouldn't you? I mean, for that amount of months, absolutely.
1:24.8	Let's see if we can get there. So the last episode was kind of more of a historical narrative.
1:29.8	This one is more ranging around ideas.
	...

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