The case for taming artificial intelligence.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino.

Gary Marcus is worried about AI.

The professor emeritus at NYU doesn't count himself a Luddite or technopessimist.

In fact, he co-founded a machine learning startup that was acquired by Uber in 2016.

But Marcus has become one of the loudest voices of caution when it comes to AI. He's chronicled some of the funniest and most disturbing errors made by current tools like ChatGPT, calling out many of the costs, both human and environmental, of an industry that continues to accrete money and power. In his new book, Taming Silicon

Valley, How We Can Ensure That AI Works for Us, Marcus lays out his vision for a responsible

path forward, one he worries may be further out of reach, though not impossible, given the

results of the election.

The point of my book was to say, you know, the tech companies aren't really going to self-regulate,

and we can't really count on the government because they have so much power over the government.

And so the only thing that we can do as citizens is to stand up and say, you know, this is not

acceptable to us. So, for example,

I talked about the notion of a boycott. You know, we could as a group of citizens say, look,

we like the idea of AI. We want to use AI. But the AI that we have right now is morally and

technically inadequate. It's damaging to the environment. It's ripping off artists and writers.

It's discriminating against people. It's also unreliable. Come back to us when you have an AI that we

can trust that doesn't have all of these negative consequences for society. Then we'll use it.

In the meantime, we'll wait. And the parallel here is, you know, for years, all these industrial companies would pour all kinds of chemicals into the environment.

And we all had to, as citizens, had to eat the consequences.

There's a famous quote to privatize the profits and socialize the cost.

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