Navigating Uncertainties in Future Technologies

Episode 122

I spoke with Azeem Azhar about:

* The speed of progress in AI

* Historical context for some of the terminology we use and how we think about technology

* What we might want our future to look like

Azeem is an entrepreneur, investor, and adviser. He is the creator of Exponential View, a global platform for in-depth technology analysis, and the host of the Bloomberg Original series Exponentially.

Reach me at editor@thegradient.pub for feedback, ideas, guest suggestions.

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Outline:

* (00:00) Intro

* (00:32) Ad read — MLOps conference

* (01:05) Problematizing the term “exponential”

* (07:35) Moore’s Law as social contract, speed of technological growth and impedances

* (14:45) Academic incentives, interdisciplinary work, rational agents and historical context

* (21:24) Monolithic scaling

* (26:38) Investment in scaling

* (31:22) On Sam Altman

* (36:25) Uses of “AGI,” “intelligence”

* (41:32) Historical context for terminology

* (48:58) AI and teaching

* (53:51) On the technology-human divide

* (1:06:26) New technologies and the futures we want

* (1:10:50) Inevitability narratives

* (1:17:01) Rationality and objectivity

* (1:21:13) Cultural affordances and intellectual history

* (1:26:15) Centralized and decentralized AI systems

* (1:32:54) Instruction tuning and helpful/honest/harmless

* (1:39:18) Azeem’s future outlook

* (1:46:15) Outro

Links:

* Azeem’s website and Twitter

* Exponential View