Who’s Afraid of A.I.? | 2023 In Review
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 31 December 2023
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
While the What Next: TBD team spends some time with their families during the holidays, we revisit some of 2023’s biggest, strangest, and best stories. Regularly scheduled programming resumes in January.
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
Originally aired May 12th, 2023
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hey everyone. Emily Peck here with What Next TBD, closing out 2023. |
| 0:09.4 | It's been a wild year folks, especially for tech. We saw AI finally break through to the mainstream. |
| 0:16.1 | Cryptostor, or former star, Sam Bankman Freed was put on trial and convicted. |
| 0:21.6 | And I mean, so much Elon Musk drama. But now it's the holidays and |
| 0:26.7 | TBD is taking a break from the news to look back at the year. We'll return with new |
| 0:31.0 | episodes in January and in the, here's one of our favorite |
| 0:34.4 | episodes from 2023. We hope you enjoy. |
| 0:40.1 | If there's one thing that defined 2023 in tech, |
| 0:43.2 | it was the rise of artificial intelligence. |
| 0:45.8 | From chat gPT to the rise and fall and rise again |
| 0:50.1 | of Open AI CEO Sam Altman, |
| 0:52.2 | 2023 was the year AI went mainstream. |
| 0:56.3 | It was also the year where people began to worry about the existential danger AI posed. |
| 1:01.9 | Doomers opined about a hypothetical apocalypse |
| 1:05.2 | brought on by sentient AI. |
| 1:07.2 | Meanwhile, there were real world harms already |
| 1:10.0 | happening because of the technology, |
| 1:11.9 | like innocent Americans arrested |
| 1:13.8 | based on faulty facial recognition. |
| 1:16.0 | Meredith Whitaker, president of the Signal Foundation, told us why the future of |
| 1:21.0 | AI looks more like the writer strike in Hollywood and |
| 1:24.1 | less like the Terminator's Skynet. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Slate Podcasts, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Slate Podcasts and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.