94. Divya Siddarth - Are we thinking about AI wrong?

AI research is often framed as a kind of human-versus-machine rivalry that will inevitably lead to the defeat — and even wholesale replacement of — human beings by artificial superintelligences that have their own sense of agency, and their own goals.

Divya Siddarth disagrees with this framing. Instead, she argues, this perspective leads us to focus on applications of AI that are neither as profitable as they could be, nor safe enough to prevent us from potentially catastrophic consequences of dangerous AI systems in the long run. And she ought to know: Divya is an associate political economist and social technologist in the Office of the CTO at Microsoft.

She’s also spent a lot of time thinking about what governments can — and are — doing to shift the framing of AI away from centralized systems that compete directly with humans, and toward a more cooperative model, which would see AI as a kind of facilitation tool that gets leveraged by human networks. Divya points to Taiwan as an experiment in digital democracy that’s doing just that.