This program is sponsored by the Covley Foundation based in Los Angeles, California.

The Covley Foundation is dedicated to advancing science for the benefit of humanity.

I'm Alan Alder, and this is Clear In Vivid, conversations about connecting and communicating.

Pretty much everything in our society was created with human intelligence, right?

Everything. So if we can amplify our intelligence to the machine intelligence,

we can also apply it to basically all aspects of our life.

And the first thing we should worry about is not by the way the machine taking over the world,

but we should worry about who controls those first machines.

Think about their least favorite political leader just for a moment.

Don't tell me who it is. We can keep this apolitical.

But just now imagine that that person is the first to have control over this incredibly intelligent machine

so they can impose their will on everyone else. How does that make you feel?

That's Max Tagmark asking a crucial question that almost never gets asked.

Max and I have had some interesting conversations over the years about his work in cosmology and mathematics.

But now he's raising questions that are a little more down to earth.

Like how can we get control of artificial intelligence?

And with his students and MIT, he's developed an app that tackles another pressing question.

How to give consumers of the news a broader range of choices than those that are fed to us by the algorithms

that act like they know us better than we know ourselves.

This is great that you could be on the show today.

You know, you have so many interests, so many, so many examples of your curiosity.

We could talk for days and days and not cover all of them.

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