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What Next: TBD | Tech, power, and the future - Who’s Afraid of A.I.?

Slate Daily Feed

Slate

Society & Culture, News, Business

3.91.1K Ratings

🗓️ 12 May 2023

⏱️ 31 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Artificial intelligence—as it already exists today—is drawing from huge troves of surveillance data and is rife with the biases built into the algorithm, in service of the huge corporations that develop and maintain the systems. The fight for the future doesn’t look like war with Skynet; it’s happening right now on the lines of the Writer’s Guild strike. 


Guests: 

Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation, co-founder of the AI Now Institute at NYU


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Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:30.0

Over the past few weeks, you might have noticed some very public hand wringing about artificial intelligence.

0:40.0

A lot of it from people who had made AI their life's work.

0:44.0

The so-called Godfather of AI is warning that an end to humanity is a real risk.

0:51.0

And he's just quit his job at Google to warn us.

0:56.0

We need to think really hard now about how we're going to control something that's more intelligent than us.

1:02.0

That's Jeffrey Hinton, an AI pioneer who's been on a bit of a media tour worrying about AI since he left Google.

1:09.0

But it's not just him.

1:11.0

There was a public letter from Elon Musk and others calling for a pause in AI development.

1:16.0

An essay in time from theorist Elias or Yudkowski saying,

1:21.0

a generative AI, the kind of tech that includes chat GPT can harm humanity or even end it.

1:28.0

Suddenly, AI doomerism feels like it's everywhere.

1:32.0

And as I've watched these warnings spread, there was one person I really wanted to talk to.

1:38.0

My name is Meredith Whitaker and I am the president of signal.

...

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