Is AI Anxiety Overblown? (Robert Wright & Timothy B. Lee)

Robert Wright's Nonzero

Nonzero

News & Politics, Society & Culture, Philosophy

4.7 • 618 Ratings

🗓️ 16 May 2023

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nonzero.org

0:00 Tim’s tech background and his new newsletter, Understanding AI 4:12 Natural selection and artificial intelligence 11:12 Why Tim is a singularity skeptic 15:17 How exactly would AI take over? And will it even want to? 24:21 The bad AI vs good AI arms race 36:05 What exactly are "AI agents"? 40:09 Why Tim is an AI job-pocalypse skeptic 51:13 Has AI created the biggest tech hype wave ever? 55:45 How Tim thinks AI will actually transform human life

Robert Wright (Bloggingheads.tv, The Evolution of God, Nonzero, Why Buddhism Is True) and Timothy B. Lee (Full Stack Economics, Understanding AI) Recorded May 10, 2023.

Comments on BhTV: http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/66149 Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Robert Wright's Non-Zero Podcast.
0:33.8	Hi, Kim.
0:35.3	Hi, Bob.
0:36.4	How you doing?
0:37.8	I'm doing great. How are you?
0:40.0	I'm not complaining. Let me introduce this. I'm Robert Wright, a publisher of the
0:43.9	Non-Zero newsletter. This is a non-zero podcast. You are Timothy B. Lee, a longtime writer
0:50.0	about economics and tech stuff.
0:57.3	You've written for, you know, Slate, Vox, Washington Post, and so on.
0:59.7	I think you're on staff at Ars Technica for a while.
1:06.8	More relevantly to today's conversation, you've got a newsletter called Understanding AI,
1:14.2	which I guess, now that's a sub-sect newsletter,, although it has its own URL at understanding AI.org. Is that true? It is interesting. Yep. And that kind of grows out. You also have another
1:22.4	newsletter that has, has that kind of blossomed into this or something, the economics newsletter?
1:28.3	Yeah. So in 2021, I started a newsletter called Full Stack Economics, and I did that for about
1:33.2	18 months, and it went pretty well. But when Chad GPT came out, I was just really impressed by
1:40.0	how well it worked and started to think this is probably going to be a big thing. I should be writing
1:44.1	about more. And I think there's a different enough audience for writing about AI versus economics
1:48.8	that had made sense to have a different newsletter. And so I put full-tech economics on hold and I'm
1:52.8	basically doing understanding AI full-time now. And I think I'll probably continue for at least a few
1:57.9	more months with that newsletter. Okay. So you may bring that to a halt and return to the other one or the, I guess you don't know. They may, they may persist. It's a little bit of an entrepreneurial thing. I mean, if the AI newsletter is much more popular, I keep doing it. If it interests Peter's out, I might go back to the economics. Yeah, so I'm not, I'm not sure exactly. Right now, I'm just very interested in what's happening in AI. So I'm just interested in keeping writing about that. Yeah, so am I. So I'm really looking forward to interrogating you about this, because I think you understand more about it than I do. For one thing, you have an actual background. You have a master's degree in computer science from Princeton.
2:35.3	Is that right?
2:36.1	That's right, yeah.
	...

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