Have you actually given enough thought to what could go right with AI?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carrino.

There's no shortage of bullish voices on artificial intelligence among the titans of tech,

but even many of the leading evangelists, in addition to prevailing pop culture narratives,

tend to strike a note of impending doom when envisioning the future of the technology.

Reid Hoffman wants us to consider the alternative.

He's the co-founder of LinkedIn, also a founding investor and former board member of Open AI,

before he branched into other ventures like Inflection AI.

He's got a new book out called Super Agency,

What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future?

Hoffman joined us to discuss it, starting with what he means by Super Agency.

Well, what I mean by Super Agency is that elevation of human agency that we get when we get new superpowers from technology,

and in particular, when millions of us get that new superpowers at the same time.

And so, for example, you know what you think when you got a car,

well, that increased your mobility. You could drive places.

But when other people got cars, too, doctors could come

do home visits, moving became a lot easier, just a whole set of things. And that's what

super agency is. And the sort of second part, what could possibly go right with our AI future?

I mean, why did you want to write about this now? Well, I find that most of the discourse around AI is motivated by fear, uncertainty,

what are all the things that could go wrong?

And you never get the future you want by prohibiting the ones you don't.

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