Is There a Future for AI?

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I don't have a level of confidence that nothing will go wrong. In fact, I anticipate that much will gowrong. The ancients were completely unready to tackle any of these problems because they had not built the human colossus. When you open things up like we did on August 22nd when we released our entire model with weights, we had a Cambrian-like explosion of innovation and creativity. It's very presumptuous in my opinion for me to presume that every good idea is going to be observed on the face of it.

Ahead of the release of the next episode of his lecture series on René Girard, Johnathan Bi returns for his second appearance on the show. He and Jim discuss Girard, prestige, innovation, AI, and much more. Enjoy! Important Links:

Show Notes:

The Girardian notion of prestige
What proof is there for mimesis?
The difference between mimesis and status signalling
Philosophical critiques of Girard
Girard on innovation
Historical understandings of innovation
A conversation between a pessimist and an optimist
AI, progress and the panopticon
Could we ban innovation?

Books Mentioned:

The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play It; by Will Storr
The Alchemy of Finance; by George Soros
The Laws of Imitation; by Gabriel Tarde
When These Things Begin: Conversations with Michel Treguer; by René Girard
The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World; by David Deutsch
The Invention of Improvement: Information and Material Progress in Seventeenth-Century England; by Paul Slack
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future; by Peter Thiel