About this episode

Dr. Craig Kaplan discusses the implications of artificial super intelligence and the need for smarter AI design.

Most of the AI conversation is fixated on AGI: when machines will match human intelligence, and which lab gets there first. Dr. Craig Kaplan thinks that is the wrong thing to watch. The real story is what comes seconds later artificial super intelligence, systems a thousand times, or even a trillion times, smarter than the smartest human alive. And he believes it is arriving faster than almost anyone is prepared for. Craig has been working on this since the 1980s. He earned his doctorate at Carnegie Mellon alongside Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon, one of the scientists who named the field of AI, and he has spent decades building collective intelligence systems — including ones that traded billions of dollars on Wall Street and beat the best hedge funds. That track record is the foundation of his core argument in this episode: the widely held belief that safer AI must mean slower AI is simply wrong. You do not need to slow down, he says. You need a smarter design. That design is a democratic "society" of cooperating AI agents — millions of them, each carrying the values of a separate human checking one another in the open, rather than a single monolithic black box no one can see…

People in this episode

Host: Maryrose Lyons

Guest: Dr. Craig Kaplan

Topics covered

• artificial intelligence
• super intelligence
• collective intelligence
• AI safety
• democratic AI design

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Carnegie Mellon

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