AI: What's Hype? What's Reality?

Guests Jerry Kaplan of Stanford University, Oren Etzioni of The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, research fellow Geoffrey Hinton of Google, Hilary Mason of Cloudera, and author Nick Bostrom join host Walter Isaacson and trace the origins of AI, each milestone to date, and reveal how it’s evolving at lightning speed.

Stanley Kubrick is no one’s idea of an optimist (in film, anyway). Yet, in his landmark 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Kubrick projected a vision into the future that humans still haven’t been able to shake: an intelligent machine, gone rogue, rising up against that who it’d been tasked to serve. The vivid horror shaped the way we view AI, and – to this day – scientists, technologists’, businesses and policymakers still debate this possibility. We may have a long way before we find out the answer, but we’ve come a long way so far just to get here.

So will AI rebel against humans? Although many are terrified, a school of thought exists that AI simply wouldn’t have interest in human affairs. Yet, with algorithms and analytics helping diagnose and treat diseases like cancer, humans are very interested in AI’s potential. And, more viscerally still, interested in if AI will automate them out of a job. Humans may make mistakes, but unless we can trust AI to be objective and perfect, so, too, will machines. Plus, without true emotion and real-time intuition, jobs like doctors are more than safe for the foreseeable future. Of chief concern: combatting implicit bias in AI. Technologists are refining algorithms to ensure non-discriminatory objectivity in decision-making. AI may not replace us, but if deployed powerfully and perfectly, AI may be the last invention humans ever need.

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