Welcome to the Quillette podcast, hosted on alternate weeks by me, Jonathan Kay, and by Iona Italia.

Quillette is where Freethought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

You are about to hear a free preview of this week's episode. To hear the full episode and to get

access to all our podcasts and articles, visit us at quillette.com and click the subscribe button.

Hello everyone. I'm your host today. Iona Italian. For this week's episode, I interviewed Dr. David Weizner. David is an

associate professor of management at York University. He is the author of the new book, Thinking

Like a Human, the Power of Your Mind in the Age of AI, the founder of the Artful Intelligence Institute, and writes the

Managing with Meaning blog for Psychologists today.

The springboard for our discussion was an article David wrote for Quillette, called

Algorithmic Supremicis and AI Hype. David and I discuss the ways in which AI tools have

fallen short of the hyperbolic promises made about them by Sam Altman and others. We talk

about the differences between algorithmic calculation of the kind done by AIs, an embodied

cognition, which is how humans think.

We also talk about what is at risk of being lost as we outsource increasing amounts of our reading and writing to AI.

I hope you enjoy my conversation with David Weizner.

You start by saying in the article that depictions of AI in films and TV and novels,

Big Tech would quote, undersell and over-deliver.

And I'm thinking of something like Battlestar Galactica, the Cylons, or the Ceylon in the Orville or Terminator, that what

generally happens in sci-fi is we create some little AI slaves to do our bidding, and they

become self-aware and they decide they don't want to be enslaved to us anymore.

And in the case of the Kalon, they decide to exterminate humanity.

And I think the silence do as well later.

...