About this episode
The episode discusses the challenges of AI safety and regulation with guest Jacob Ward, exploring the addictive nature of AI and its implications for society.
As we’ve crossed three years since OpenAI debuted ChatGPT in 2022, AI technologies have gone from a curiosity among academic scientists to one of the most popular products ever shipped. Billions of people now use AI for everything from sundry amusements to mission-critical applications, and it has started to diffuse into nearly every industry imaginable. But along with such power comes great responsibility, or at least, one would hope. Jacob Ward — the former editor of Popular Science, long-time tech correspondent, podcast host of Rip Current and the author of the popular book The Loop — is skeptical. Via his own personal experiences and reporting, he sees AI’s addictive qualities and its lack of safety as a serious challenge for regulators and society as a whole. He analogizes this challenge with the cultures of software and hardware engineers, where software is about “if we ship, then we're going to sort it out” and hardware is about how “scale compounds your problems.”Alongside host Danny Crichton , the two talk about biases and decision-making, the connections between AI and casino gambling, why LLMs are like experimenting on people in the wild, how to think about regulating…
People in this episode
Host: Danny Crichton
Guest: Jacob Ward
Topics covered
- AI safety
- regulation
- technology
- decision-making
- biases
- cognitive liberty
Keywords
- AI
- safety
- regulation
- biases
- decision-making
- cognitive liberty
- technology
- OpenAI
- ChatGPT
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: OpenAI, Popular Science
Books & works: The Loop
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