Cyber’s intro music has clips from various movies. The first is from WarGames, a 1983 film where a hacker squares off against an artificial intelligence that’s in control of the nukes. Almost forty years later and AI is beating people at Starcraft 2, which is not quite the organization of a nuclear war but can still feel scary.

But how smart are these systems really? Is AI, or “machine learning” as practitioners prefer to call it, the next big thing or just another in a series of promises about the future that hasn’t quite materialized? What are the actual dangers of these systems?

Here to help us answer this question is Os Keyes. Keyes is PhD student at the University of Washington’s Department of Human Centred Design & Engineering and an occasional Motherboard contributor. Their area of expertise is, broadly, how technology constructs the world we live in.

It’s a wide-ranging conversation that covers everything from Henry Kissinger to Human Centipede and the hard limits of artificial intelligence.

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Global Questions: China on the world stage

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