Is AI Pessimism Feeding the Powerful? (with Rumman Chowdhury)

Dr. Rumman Chowdhury, an AI ethicist and the head of Humane Intelligence, is sick of all this complaining. Not because there isn’t plenty to complain about — in this episode we unpack a host of horrors that AI and the companies who make it are foisting on all of us — but because she believes that the fatalism of AI criticism inadvertently empowers powerful corporations. Dr. Chowdhury, who has worked at Accenture, Twitter, and served as a science envoy for the Biden administration, has an unusual background for an AI builder — political science and quantitative social sciences — and her work on the inherent biases within algorithms has led her to believe that the solutions are far more complicated than just switching the whole thing off. Enjoy!

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00:00 Introduction: The Pessimism Around AI

00:36 Meet Dr. Rumman Chowdhury: AI Ethicist

02:00 The Role of Political Science in AI

04:26 Challenges in Creating Ethical AI

06:20 The Myth of Political Neutrality in Algorithms

14:10 From Accenture to Twitter: A Journey in AI

16:17 The Twitter Experience: Ethics and Algorithms

19:07 The Impact of Social Media Algorithms

26:18 The Audacity of Modern AI Developments

33:12 The Podcast’s Initial Concept and NPC Idea

34:23 Nostalgia Culture and the Creative Class

36:09 The Loop: AI and Legal Precedents

36:58 Algorithmic Choice and User Agency

38:59 Right to Repair and Algorithmic Agency

40:23 Exit, Voice, and Loyalty in Tech

45:47 Algorithmic Amplification of Right-Wing Content

01:03:13 The Hero Narrative and Collective Movements

01:05:13 Conclusion and Call to Action