Can Artificial Intelligence Be Moral? (with Paul Bloom)

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🗓️ 25 December 2023

⏱️ 63 minutes

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Summary

It seems obvious that moral artificial intelligence would be better than the alternative. But psychologist Paul Bloom of the University of Toronto thinks moral AI is not just a meaningless goal but a bad one. Listen as Bloom and EconTalk's Russ Roberts have a wide-ranging conversation about the nature of AI, the nature of morality, and the value of ensuring that we mortals can keep doing stupid or terrible things.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:08.0	I'm your host Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to Econ Talk. in to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done
0:24.5	going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econ talk.org we'd love to hear from you. Today is December 5th, 2003, I'm my guest is psychologist and author Paul Bloom of the University of Toronto.
0:44.0	This is Paul's fifth appearance on Econ Talk last year in February of this year talking
0:49.6	about his book Psych.
0:51.6	Paul, welcome back to Econ Talk.
0:53.2	It's great to be back. Thanks for having me.
0:55.8	Our topic for today is a recent piece you did in the New Yorker.
0:59.3	How moral can AI really be? And it raises a raft of interesting questions and some answers, but it
1:09.6	raises them in a way that's different I think that the standard issues that have been raised in this area.
1:14.0	The standard issues are, is it going to destroy us or not?
1:18.0	That would be one level of morality.
1:20.0	Is it going to destroy human beings?
1:22.0	But you're interested in a subtler question,
1:25.0	but I suspect we'll talk about both.
1:28.0	What does that title mean, How moral can AI be? What did you have in mind?
1:37.0	So I have a substack which came out this morning which talks about the article and expands in it and has an even blunter title which I'm willing to to buy into which is we don't want moral AI.
1:50.0	And so the question is just to take things back a bit, a lot of people are worried AI will
1:57.1	kill us all.
1:58.5	Some people think that that's ridiculous, you know, science fiction gone amok but even the people who who think it's ridiculous
2:05.9	think AI has a potential to do some harm everything from you know massive
2:09.8	unemployment to spreading fake news to you know creating pathogens that evil people tell it to
	...

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