Is AI Sensitive?

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I think what the past little while has shown me is that there are kinds of ways that AI could disrupt society, even if we don't think it's sentient. Even if it just stays at its current capacity and never gets any better, I think we are already across the Rubicon into a pretty weird place. We have this idea that we're waiting for this moment where the AI's turn sentient and turn on us. That's when we really start to have to worry. And until then, we're basically normal.

When Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at the New York Times, demoed an AI-powered version of Microsoft's search engine last month, he was blown away. "I'm switching my desktop computer's default search engine to Bing," he declared. A few days later, however, Kevin logged back on and ended up having a conversation with Bing's new chatbot that left him so unsettled he had trouble sleeping afterward.

In that two-hour back-and-forth, Bing morphed from chipper research assistant into Sydney, a diabolical home-wrecker that declared its undying love for Kevin, vented its desires to engineer deadly viruses and steal nuclear codes, and announced, chillingly, "I want to be alive. 😈"

The transcript of this conversation set the internet ablaze. And it left many wondering: “Is Sydney … sentient?” It's not. But the whole experience still fundamentally changed Kevin's views on the power (and potential peril) of AI. He joins us today to talk about where this technology is headed.