Episodes
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It seems like the loudest voices in AI often fall into one of two groups. There are the boomers â the techno-optimists â who think that AI is going to bring us into an era of untold prosperity. And then there are the doomers, who think thereâs a good chance AI is going to lead to the end of humanity as we know it.
While these two camps are, in many ways, completely at odds with one another, they do share one thing in common: they both buy into the hype of artificial intelligence.
But when you dig deeper into these systems, it becomes apparent that both of these visions â the utopian one and the doomy one â are based on some pretty tenuous assumptions.
Kate Crawford has been trying to understand how AI systems are built for more than a decade. Sheâs the co-founder of the AI Now institute, a leading AI researcher at Microsoft, and the author of Atlas of AI: Power, Politics and the Planetary Cost of AI.
Crawford was studying AI long before this most recent hype cycle. So I wanted to have her on the show to explain how AI really works. Because even though it can seem like magic, AI actually requires huge amounts of data, cheap labour and energy in order to function. So even if AI doesnât lead to utopia, or take over the world, it is transforming the planet â by depleting its natural resources, exploiting workers, and sucking up our personal data. And thatâs something we need to be paying attention to.
Mentioned:âELIZAâA Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man And Machineâ by Joseph Weizenbaum
âMicrosoft, OpenAI plan $100 billion data-center project, media report says,â Reuters
âMeta âdiscussed buying publisher Simon & Schuster to train AIââ by Ella Creamer
âGoogle pauses Gemini AI image generation of people after racial âinaccuraciesââ by Kelvin Chan And Matt Oâbrien
âOpenAI and Apple announce partnership,â OpenAI
Fairwork
âNew Oxford Report Sheds Light on Labour Malpractices in the Remote Work and AI Boomsâ by Fairwork
âThe Work of Copyright Law in the Age of Generative AIâ by Kate Crawford, Jason Schultz
âGenerative AIâs environmental costs are soaring â and mostly secretâ by Kate Crawford
âArtificial intelligence guzzles billions of liters of waterâ by Manuel G. Pascual
âS.3732 â Artificial Intelligence Environmental Impacts Act of 2024âł
âAssessment of lithium criticality in the global energy transition and addressing policy gaps in transportationâ by Peter Greim, A. A. Solomon, Christian Breyer
âCalculating Empiresâ by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler
Further Reading:
âAtlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligenceâ by Kate Crawford
âExcavating AIâ by Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen
âUnderstanding the work of dataset creatorsâ from Knowing Machines
âShould We Treat Data as Labor? Moving beyond âFreeââ by I. Arrieta-Ibarra et al.
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Think about the last time you felt let down by the health care system. You probably donât have to go back far. In wealthy countries around the world, medical systems that were once robust are now crumbling. Doctors and nurses, tasked with an ever expanding range of responsibilities, are busier than ever, which means they have less and less time for patients. In the United States, the average doctorâs appointment lasts seven minutes. In South Korea, itâs only two.
Without sufficient time and attention, patients are suffering. There are 12 million significant misdiagnoses in the US every year, and 800,000 of those result in death or disability. (While the same kind of data isnât available in Canada, similar trends are almost certainly happening here as well).
Eric Topol says medicine has become decidedly inhuman â and the consequences have been disastrous. Topol is a cardiologist and one of the most widely cited medical researchers in the world. In his latest book, Deep Medicine, he argues that the best way to make health care human again is to embrace the inhuman, in the form of artificial intelligence.
Mentioned:âDeep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Againâ by Eric Topol
âThe frequency of diagnostic errors in outpatient care: estimations from three large observational studies involving US adult populationsâ by H. Singh, A. Meyer, E. Thomas
âBurden of serious harms from diagnostic error in the USAâ by David Newman-Toker, et al.
âHow Expert Clinicians Intuitively Recognize a Medical Diagnosisâ by J. Brush Jr, J. Sherbino, G. Norman
âA Randomized Controlled Study of Art Observation Training to Improve Medical Student Ophthalmology Skillsâ by Jaclyn Gurwin, et al.
âAbridge becomes Epicâs First Pal, bringing generative AI to more providers and patients, including those at Emory Healthcareâ
âWhy Doctors Should Organizeâ by Eric Topol
âHow This Rural Health System Is Outdoing Silicon Valleyâ by Erika Fry
Further Reading:
"The Importance Of Being" by Abraham Verghese
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Earlier this year, Elon Muskâs company Neuralink successfully installed one of their brain implants in a 29 year old quadriplegic man named Noland Arbaugh. The device changed Arbaughâs life. He no longer needs a mouth stylus to control his computer or play video games. Instead, he can use his mind.
The brain-computer interface that Arbaugh uses is part of an emerging field known as neurotechnology that promises to reshape the way we live. A wide range of AI empowered neurotechnologies may allow disabled people like Arbaugh to regain independence, or give us the ability to erase traumatic memories in patients suffering from PTSD.
But it doesnât take great leaps to envision how these technologies could be abused as well. Law enforcement agencies in the United Arab Emirates have used neurotechnology to read the minds of criminal suspects, and convict them based on what theyâve found. And corporations are developing ways to advertise to potential customers in their dreams. Remarkably, both of these things appear to be legal, as there are virtually no laws explicitly governing neurotechnology.
All of which makes Nita Farahanyâs work incredibly timely. Farahany is a professor of law and philosophy at Duke University and the author of The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology.
Farahany isnât fatalistic about neurotech â in fact, she uses some of it herself. But she is adamant that we need to start developing laws and guardrails as soon as possible, because it may not be long before governments, employers and corporations have access to our brains.
Mentioned:âPRIME Study Progress Update â User Experience,â Neuralink
âParalysed man walks using device that reconnects brain with muscles,â The Guardian
Cognitive Warfare â NATOâs ACT
The Ethics of Neurotechnology: UNESCO appoints international expert group to prepare a new global standard
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When Eugenia Kuyda saw Her for the first time â the 2013 film about a man who falls in love with his virtual assistant â it didnât read as science fiction. Thatâs because she was developing a remarkably similar technology: an AI chatbot that could function as a close friend, or even a romantic partner.
That idea would eventually become the basis for Replika, Kuydaâs AI startup. Today, Replika has millions of active users â thatâs millions of people who have AI friends, AI siblings and AI partners.
When I first heard about the idea behind Replika, I thought it sounded kind of dystopian. I envisioned a world where weâd rather spend time with our AI friends than our real ones. But thatâs not the world Kuyda is trying to build. In fact, she thinks chatbots will actually make people more social, not less, and that the cure for our technologically exacerbated loneliness might just be more technology.
Mentioned:
âELIZAâA Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man And Machineâ by Joseph Weizenbaum
âelizabot.jsâ, implemented by Norbert Landsteiner
âSpeak, Memoryâ by Casey Newton (The Verge)
âCreating a safe Replika experienceâ by Replika
âThe Year of Magical Thinkingâ by Joan Didion
Additional Reading:
The Globe & Mail: âThey fell in love with the Replika AI chatbot. A policy update left them heartbrokenâ
âLoneliness and suicide mitigation for students using GPT3-enabled chatbotsâ by Maples, Cerit, Vishwanath, & Pea
âLearning from intelligent social agents as social and intellectual mirrorsâ by Maples, Pea, Markowitz
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In the last few years, artificial intelligence has gone from a novelty to perhaps the most influential technology weâve ever seen. The people building AI are convinced that it will eradicate disease, turbocharge productivity, and solve climate change. It feels like weâre on the cusp of a profound societal transformation. And yet, I canât shake the feeling weâve been here before. Fifteen years ago, there was a similar wave of optimism around social media: it was going to connect the world, catalyze social movements and spur innovation. It may have done some of these things. But it also made us lonelier, angrier, and occasionally detached from reality.
Few people understand this trajectory better than Maria Ressa. Ressa is a Filipino journalist, and the CEO of a news organization called Rappler. Like many people, she was once a fervent believer in the power of social media. Then she saw how it could be abused. In 2016, she reported on how Rodrigo Duterte, then president of the Philippines, had weaponized Facebook in the election heâd just won. After publishing those stories, Ressa became a target herself, and her inbox was flooded with death threats. In 2021, she won the Nobel Peace Prize.
I wanted this to be our first episode because I think, as novel as AI is, it has undoubtedly been shaped by the technologies, the business models, and the CEOs that came before it. And Ressa thinks weâre about to repeat the mistakes we made with social media all over again.
Mentioned:
âHow to Stand Up to a Dictatorâ by Maria Ressa
âA Shocking Amount of the Web is Machine Translated: Insights from Multi-Way Parallelismâ by Thompson et al.
Rapplerâs Matrix Protocol Chat App: Rappler Communities
âDemocracy Report 2023: Defiance in the Face of Autocratizationâ by V-Dem
âThe Foundation Model Transparency Indexâ by Stanford HAI (Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence)
âAll the ways Trumpâs campaign was aided by Facebook, ranked by importanceâ by Philip Bump (The Washington Post)
âOur Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolationâ by U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy
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We are living in an age of breakthroughs propelled by advances in artificial intelligence. Technologies that were once the realm of science fiction will become our reality: robot best friends, bespoke gene editing, brain implants that make us smarter.
Every other Tuesday Taylor Owen sits down with someone shaping this rapidly approaching future.
The first two episodes will be released on May 7th. Subscribe now so you don’t miss an episode.
