The Dharma of Artificial Intelligence (AI) | Jasmine Wang & Iain S. Thomas
10% Happier with Dan Harris
10% Media, LLC
4.6 • 12.9K Ratings
🗓️ 2 August 2023
⏱️ 64 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Our guests today trained an AI on the world's most beloved texts, from the Bible to the Koran to the words of Marcus Aurelius, Maya Angelou, and Leonard Cohen. Then, they asked the AI life's hardest questions. The AI's answers ranged from strange to surprising to transcendent.
Jasmine Wang, a technologist, and Iain S. Thomas, a poet, join us to talk about not only the answers they received from the robot, but also why they are deeply concerned about where AI might be headed.
In this episode we talk about:
- The origins of the book
- The definitions of some basic AI terminology
- The biggest takeaways of their conversation with AI—some of the answers they got back were fascinating and beautiful
- The perils and promise of AI (we spend a lot of time here)
- The ways in which AI may force us to rethink fundamental aspects of our own nature
- And what we all can do to increase the odds that our AI future is more positive than not
For tickets to TPH's live event in Boston on September 7:
https://thewilbur.com/armory/artist/dan-harris/
Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/jasmine-wang-and-iain-s-thomas
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | This is the 10% Happier Podcast, I'm Dan Harris. |
| 0:19.4 | Hello everybody, like many of you I have been following the discussions around artificial |
| 0:24.9 | intelligence with great interest and no small amount of anxiety. |
| 0:29.5 | What is this technology about to do to our lives? |
| 0:32.9 | Is everything really about to change and how so are we vectoring towards Utopia or Armageddon? |
| 0:40.2 | My team and I have been wrestling with how and when and whether to address this stuff |
| 0:43.4 | on the show. |
| 0:44.4 | We were trying to figure out what if anything we might have to add. |
| 0:48.0 | And then our senior producer DJ Cashmere came up with a great starting point. |
| 0:52.0 | He found a book in which a poet and a technologist teamed up to feed some of humanity's most |
| 0:58.2 | cherished works like the Bible, the Doudacheng, the Quran, the poetry of Maya Angelou and much |
| 1:04.9 | much more. |
| 1:06.1 | They fed all of it into the world's most advanced AI GPT-3 and then they asked GPT-3 some |
| 1:12.5 | big questions about the meaning of life and how to do life better. |
| 1:16.2 | And they described the resulting book, which is called What Makes Us Human and Artificial |
| 1:20.7 | Intelligence, answers life's biggest questions. |
| 1:23.5 | They described this book as a conversation with a chorus of our ancestors, a chat with |
| 1:29.2 | a compendium of human wisdom. |
| 1:32.5 | And I should say they did all of this work before chat GPT was released a few months ago |
| 1:37.8 | and then blew everybody's mind and got everybody really talking about AI. |
| 1:42.1 | The authors in question here are Jasmine Wang, a technologist and philosopher who has worked |
| 1:46.6 | with the partnership on AI and also open AI proprietors of the aforementioned chat GPT. |
... |
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