This podcast explores the rapid advance of AI and its influence on society. It provides a historical overview of the development of AI, discusses the limitations of AI models, examines power concentration in Silicon Valley, and explores how AI will impact various systems in our lives.
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The podcast explores the rapid advance of AI and its impact on society, raising questions about the future of humanity and control over technology.
It discusses the rise of generative AI and deepfakes, highlighting the potential for synthetic media and the ethical concerns surrounding their use.
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The Rapid Advance of Technology and its Reach into Our Lives
The podcast episode explores the rapid advance of technology and its increasing impact on our lives. It discusses how artificial intelligence (AI) is shaping the future and the forces that will determine its power. The episode highlights the release of OpenAI's chat GPT in November 2022, which had a significant impact on the accessibility of cutting-edge AI models. The conversation focuses on the opportunities and challenges presented by AI, highlighting the potential for huge advancements and the simultaneous emergence of new threats.
The Definition and Evolution of Artificial Intelligence
The episode delves into the definition of artificial intelligence (AI) and its evolution over time. It explores the popular perception of AI influenced by movies and novels, which portrays AI as machines capable of human-like intelligence. However, the episode also emphasizes that the majority of AI research focuses on narrow applications, developing machines that excel in specific tasks like translation or driving cars. The distinction between narrow and wide problems in AI is discussed, highlighting that while significant progress has been made in narrow tasks, creating a fully capable general AI remains a challenge.
The Rise of Generative AI and Deepfakes
The podcast episode explores the rise of generative AI and deepfakes. It explains that generative AI involves using algorithms that can replicate authentic data and create synthetic media that resembles the original. The episode describes how generative AI can be applied to various forms of media, including images, audio, video, and text. It also discusses the potential impact and ethical concerns of deepfakes, which emerged in 2017, focusing on the use of generative AI for malicious purposes or spreading disinformation.
Power Shifts and Centralization in Silicon Valley
The episode highlights the concentration of power in Silicon Valley and its impact on technological innovation. It discusses the origins of Silicon Valley, tracing back to its involvement in military research and development. The episode emphasizes the massive concentration of power in the hands of a few individuals and companies, raising concerns about centralized control and limited access to the technology. It calls for more public scrutiny and evaluation of AI, as well as discussions around directing technological advancements towards social good.
When did you first hear of GPT, Claude, DALL-E or Bard? Feels like a while ago, right? In barely over a year AI has permeated our conversations, our places of work and it feels omnipresent in the culture. It also threatens to make some of the pillars of our society redundant. Join researcher and author Carl Miller for POWER TRIP, a brand new podcast from Intelligence Squared, to see where that journey is leading us.
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Technology is going to impact the future of humanity in ways that we may never have predicted and in the coming years perhaps in ways we can no longer control. In this first episode, Carl Miller guides us through the journey of how we got to this point in the story of AI and asks whether historians in the future will look at the era as one of pre-GPT and post-GPT. Featuring Michael Wooldridge, Director of Foundational AI Research at the Turing Institute and professor of computer science at the University of Oxford; Judy Wajcman, Principal Investigator of the Women in Data Science and AI project at The Alan Turing Institute; Henry Ajder, Generative AI & Deepfakes Expert Advisor and AI researcher Connor Leahy, CEO of Conjuncture.