Eric Hoel is a neuroscientist. He was last here in September of 2022 talking about effective altruism. Today we're going to talk about two recent essays of his on artificial intelligence and chat, GPT. Why should we take this latest foray into AI chat GPT?
They operate according to rules we can never fully understand. They can be unreliable, uncontrollable, and misaligned with human values. They're fast becoming as intelligent as humans--and they're exclusively in the hands of profit-seeking tech companies. "They," of course, are the latest versions of AI, which herald, according to neuroscientist and writer Erik Hoel, a species-level threat to humanity. Listen as he tells EconTalk's Russ Roberts why we need to treat AI as an existential threat.