Will AI destroy us... or save us?

In about 10 minutes, you'll learn something new about history, science, geography, and more.

Everything everywhere daily, wherever you get your podcasts. Open the pod bay doors, help. I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that. This conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.

“Most of us, when we hear the term AI, we think about Hollywood. Why do you cry?”

You mean people? Yeah. I don't know. We just cry. We think about the terminator. We think about ex machina. Do you program her to flirt with me? If I did, would that be cheating? Wouldn't it? We think about Star Trek. Please state the nature of the medical emergency. For maybe Star Wars, Hollywood is so deeply embedded in our brains. I'll be back.

What does AI actually mean? Really mean? AI is not a magic one, but there's no terminator. The system lands by accessing data. AI is not a harbinger of utopia or dystopian, and it changes its configuration in order to be able to predict that. AI is something invented by us to advance our progress. It's really complicated, beautiful math,

but it is fundamentally just math. AI is deeply entangled with our desire to be in control, both of ourselves and the world around us, to control human behavior, to control the future, to control environmental outcomes, to control institutions and societies. AI is already here. It's in your phones. Eury or Google or Alexa. Your cars. Google maps use a very smart algorithm your homes. The home security system uses artificial intelligence to keep your family safe.

Your skies from drones to unmanned aircrafts and beyond. Your hospitals. Interpreting X-rays. Your love lives. The dating apps. You're virtual lives. Social media companies spy on us. Your governments. What it means for the future of our democracy? So we are in fact totally immersed in an AI world. The challenge is not to act automatically. It's the final action that is not automatic from painting to breathing to talking to falling in love.

Are you capable of falling in love? I don't have feelings or emotions like love, and I don't have a subjective experience. I exist solely to assist with generating text. This is chart GPT. I am an AI language model developed by Open AI. I can answer questions, provide information and engage in conversations on a variety of topics.

“How may I assist you today? AI has become an invisible architecture upon which modern life is being built.”

It's wrapped up in our jobs, our government, our wars, our art. Sometimes without us even realizing it. Right now, we're inside a computer program. Is it really so hard to believe? You've been living in a dream world, Neil.

There's something powerful about the story, the matrix, and countless other sci-fi books and movies tell.

The AI becomes sentient, surpasses human intelligence, and lays claim to our world. Sure, it's a terrifying thing to imagine. And yet, we're fascinated by these stories. Exploring that feeling, the tension between our love of AI and our fear of it, is what this episode is really about. In a sense, decoding the humans behind the machines. As an animal,

“we're a very weak creature. The only thing that we have is our social structure and our collective”

individual minds. And those minds compel us to extend our capabilities. And that is, I think, in many ways,

why people sort of imagined gods being just like them only more powerful. This is George

Zarkodakis. I have a PhD in AI and I'm actively working in the field over many years.

day, called in our own image. Will AI save us or destroy us?

“At the heart of this history, are a few key questions. Why do we want to create artificial”

intelligence? What would it mean for a machine to become intelligent? And how would that change our lives? Most of the questions, I don't think we'll be able to answer at this particular point in history, but I don't think we can resist the temptation of asking them and trying to answer them. Coming up, we begin at the very beginning, the big bang of the human mind. This message comes from everything everywhere daily. One of the world's most popular daily

education podcasts. In about 10 minutes, you'll learn something new about history, science, geography, and more. Everything everywhere daily, wherever you get your podcasts. What is a human? What is a human? A human is a species of primates characterized by advanced cognitive abilities and a capacity for abstract reasoning. They have a highly developed brain, and have created complex societies, over thousands of years. They have the unique ability of

self-awareness, allowing them to understand their own thoughts, emotions, and experiences. Humans are capable of both great kindness and compassion, as well as violence and aggression. Part one, I think, therefore, I am. Wonder is the feeling of the lost Earth, and the loss of it begins in wonder. I lived in Athens, then I was like five, six years old, and it was summer time,

and in Greece, they still do it. They have like, open air cinemas. When the summer you go in the open air cinemas, there's no roof, there's a screen in front of you, you sit there, you look a lot of noise, it's great. My mother took me to watch a film that the people had the cinema decided to show. It was an old film, it was called "Forbidden Planet". It was all about, you know, a spaceship landing on another planet and finding a sort of this crazy scientist who had a robot.

And that was the first time I actually saw a robot in my life. Welcome to L. Tier 4, gentlemen. I am to transport you to the residence.

I never imagined that it would be a thing. If you do not speak English,

I am at your disposal with a hundred and eighty-seven other languages, along with a very

“style of metal. The head of mine. You are a robot, aren't you?”

That is correct, sir. For your convenience, I am monitored to respond to the name Robbie. Ever since that moment, I was so fascinated with the idea that we can develop artifacts, artificial things that can think, that can act, that can behave, like us humans. It was 1969 when George watched in Wonder as Robbie the robot rolled across the big screen. Something that may have seemed like a far-off reality for a kid growing up in the sixties.

But then again, humans had just witnessed man landing on the moon. I mean, that was the culmination, the realization of centuries of dreaming about going to space. For George and millions of others around the world, it was proof that humans can imagine and then create the capacity to transcend ourselves. And that stories provide the road map. Interviewed a lot of people to see what made them become scientists or engineers.

And it was always some kind of book, kind of comic, something that excited them, the imagination.

It could be the outer space of planets and asteroids, but it could also be the inner space, the human body. Those stories are very powerful, and I try to explore the stories

“where they come from. What are the telling us about this desire to become in a way like God's?”

So, you know, big bang of the universe, whatever was before, something happened, it changed. Boom.

Our species have been around probably for maybe 300 or 400,000 years.

“And yet for most of that time, we're doing, you know,”

she's linked some stones, hunting some animals, you know, living very simply in caves, you know. Not a lot was happening. And then around 1460,000 years ago, boom. The big bang of the human mind.

Something amazing happens, and our ancestors, across the world, by the way,

right, start creating art, start to narrate, tell stories about how they experience the world. When love beckons to you, follow those ways, are hard and steep. Through these stories, we project our hopes, fears, and dreams, onto the canvas of the invisible unknown. All the earth is a grave, and nothing escapes it.

And nothing is that meant also that we were able to transfer information and knowledge to the next generation. The divine gift does not come from a higher power, from a long mind.

“And that's what kicked off this amazing journey of our species, to where we are today.”

What seems to have happened is some kind of genetic mutation that furnished us, our species in particular, with the ability of language, language, and stories. We know they're part of what makes us human, but what else? And part of it, what is it? How did it begin? People somehow think maybe we knew about DNA for the last several centuries, we didn't.

It really wasn't that clear what was the hereditary material that passes from parent to child and then carries all those genetic factors? This is Francis Collins, maybe you've heard of him, but in case not,

I asked Chatepe T to write up a bio. Here's what it gave me.

Francis Collins is a renowned physician geneticist. He earned his MD and PhD at Yale University and his best known for his leadership of the Human Genome Project, a landmark international research effort to decode the entire human genetic blueprint. The people at the University of North Carolina will be upset to hear the chat, GPT, said I got my MD from Yale, but that's okay.

Also, there's an error in there. There is an error. Were there any other mistakes?

There was a bit of an omission. I don't think there was any mention of the 12 years

I spent as a director of the National Institute of Health under three presidents, but that's okay. We asked Chatepe T to comment on its error. I apologize for any errors in the biography of Francis Collins. As a language model, I am trained on a large data set of text. I may make mistakes or emissions.

I recommend fact checking any information that I provide. Don't worry, we will. So much of the driving force behind Collins' work is trying to understand what makes humans human, like at the most basic molecular level, but also beyond that. Growing up in the 1950s, he was amazed by the recent discovery of the structure of DNA.

There were covers of life magazine saying, discovering the secret of life. Was it actually discovering the secret of life? It's maybe a little over the top, because I actually think there's more to life than just molecules,

“but certainly if you want to talk in a biological basis of life, yeah, this was discovering that.”

It's kind of, you know, the book of life that's inside each cell. It's incredibly inspiring to think about this, and it is the same kind of molecule that all living things on this planet use. Another reason to be pretty sure that we're all descended from some common ancestor, and that as this information molecule evolved over time, it took on different letters and different orders, but it was still that double helix with all of that potential.

Potential. Part of what this discovery did was show us humans a way into understanding things about

We needed to decode our genetic programming. The big question was,

"Okay, this is a book. We are information organisms, and this is our information source.

“It's digital, but it's not actually carrying out the actions. How does that happen?”

How do you take this information and cause a cell to actually do something? If we were going to get that intelligent about our own instruction book, maybe we could not just read it, but we could actually occasionally figure out how to do a fine and replace when something was misspelled. It was clear to me if we wanted to do this,

we've got to have a better database to work with. We need that human genome.

That became my dream." If you're talking about what you can see, what you can smell, you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain. This is the world that you know.

“You are listening to the heartbeat of the sage computer. Every instrument in this room”

is constantly monitoring, testing, pulse taking, and crawling. This arrow, when humans were seeking mastery of the sky and the body, was in many ways dependent on another groundbreaking technology of the time. An additional brain that can work faster than ours, but does what we wish we could do. The computer. In the old days, the world computer usually meant a person, usually a woman, actually. That sat down

and did mathematical calculations. I hand, and by rule, I rule, right? And then that word computer, which described a human being, was transposed into the machine because the machine can do it better. So the mainframe computers would only fit in these massive rooms in the basement, which is fitting because these devalued laborers who did the actual programming work were down there. My name is Stephanie Dicken. I'm an assistant professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University.

She holds a PhD in the history of science, with a specialization in the history of mathematics and computing. These machines produced massive amounts of heat and noise, and working with them, you had to carry these boxes of punch cards back and forth as input and output and stick it into the machine. This is like a sweat shop. Everything was really slow, very different from the machinery that we're all used to today, which is almost as fast as light and, you know, conforms to our

every demand. The most disturbing part of the history of AI for me comes from the fact that these men who are working in artificial intelligence looked at those massive noisy, hot, mainframe computers and saw themselves in it. They looked at them and identified a deep affinity that there was something fundamentally shared between their minds and these machines. Coming up as we unlock the secrets of man and machine, we ask the question, will this knowledge

bring us closer to perfection or destruction? Hi, this is Christopher from Los Angeles, California.

I love through on because it is always informative and keeps me alive.

This message comes from what was that like? What does it feel like to be attacked by an alligator, survive a plane crash, or when the showcase on the prices right? Real people share their most surreal moments on what was that like? An Apple Podcast Spotify or wherever you're listening now. What is a machine? A machine is a device that can perform specific tasks more efficiently, or with greater precision than humans can do alone. The basic idea behind the machine is to make

work easier. Humans have been creating machines for thousands of years, starting with simple tools like the wheel, and advancing to complex machines, like computers and robots. The relationship

“between humans and machines continues to evolve, and is likely to become increasingly important,”

as advances in artificial intelligence continue to shape our world. Part 2. A More Perfect Human

so the department is empty, and 10 men get together to invent the field of artificial intelligence.

“It was instigated by John McCarthy, who was the mathematics professor at Dartmouth,”

the proposal that John McCarthy wrote pulls no punches at all. "We propose that a two-month, ten-man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956

at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire." Second sentence. The study is to proceed

on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning, or any other feature of intelligence, can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it. So right from the beginning, there's this pronouncement that human learning and intelligence can be mechanized and automated. It fascinates me. It's an enormously grandiose idea. My name is Meredith Brissard. I'm a data journalism professor at NYU, and on the author of

more than a glitch confronting race, gender, and ability bias in tech.

“Something else that I think was really interesting about this conference is they decided on the name”

artificial intelligence as the name of their new field. I think the name was chosen aspirationaly. Most of the people who are at the forefront of artificial intelligence are great consumers of and lovers of science fiction. And so there's a lot of desire to make science fiction real that you're going to make a sentient machine. The Dartmouth conference has become an origin myth commemorated with a plaque and everything on

this site. Artificial intelligence was born, but in practice the conference was a bit of a flop, actually. There was a lot of conflict intention and disagreement, and there wasn't actually

“a coherent field that emerged out of the conference. Of course the origin myth served to empower”

these men to tell their own story. And it's a story full of erasure. We hear nothing in that origin myth about the relationships that AI has to industrialization or to capitalism or to these colonial legacies of reserveing reason for only certain kinds of people and certain kinds of thinking. That deeper story takes us back to the early days of industrialization. In the late 1700s and

early 1800s, factories started popping up across the world, reshaping the nature of work, more and more tasks that had once been done only by human hands were now the work of machines. Over an England Charles Babbage English mathematician was touring factories in the context of industrialization and thinking, "Wow, these factories can tell us something about the human mind because they tell us about how processes can be broken down and what the elementary steps

even of thought might be." So we also see in this moment to kind of devaluation of the classes of people and/or machines who do this sort of repetitive mechanical broken-down labor in service of efficiency and profit maximization in industrialization and early capitalism. Babbage was really dismissive of working-class people. He thought they were annoying and filthy

and they were always making noise and singing songs and the said famously, "I wish to God

these calculations had been produced by steam by which he meant the steam engine which was driving factory automation at the time." People have been playing around with what is called automata, essentially machines that would automatically do something simple for centuries. This is George Zarkadakis again. So there was always this idea of replicating nature, replicating movement because movement was related to life. I think the Dutch revolution was in many ways

for at least 2,000 years. Our blows will destroy their whole modern industrial

plant and organization. Something happened to our collective psyche after the atom bomb. At zero minus 15 seconds a warning tone sounds in the plane. They hoped that it would put an end to this war, put an end to a butcher that had been going on for many years. Until then, everybody was excited about the new things and about new discoveries and valued technologies and then we discovered something that can destroy us completely. I still remember the day very well,

because this was a river filled with a dead bodies. And I think that's when people realize that maybe

there are some technologies that are not for good. That's when we became graduate as public,

more skeptical to technologies. But some elite academics and scientists believed that

“better technology was actually the key to our future because it could help us bypass the messy”

parts of being human. What if human decision-making procedures were too slow? What if people's judgments are clouded by their emotions to give us more control over ourselves and the world around us? Our machines will turn out the right answers and the right decisions and the right judgements and in effect replace God with science. And it's such a confident moment in American academia. After the war, there was more money. There were more people. There was more cultural capital,

more political capital for science and technology than ever before. There's also a real concern about the practicalities of preventing a nuclear war, which was a very real threat at that time.

“We all know the atomic bomb is very dangerous. That's why these children are practicing to”

duck and cover. We hope it never comes, but since it may be used against us, we must get ready.

Nuclear detente and in particular mutually assured destruction rely very specifically on information processing capability. You need to know where your enemies nuclear arsenals are. You need to know if you've been attacked or that you're about to be. And the argument went that if the United States could have a system that could think that could strategize, that could react more intelligently than a group of generals and admirals.

Then we would have a clear advantage over the Soviet Union. The fear that people were too limited to be trusted to preserve peace, so let's double down on high technological hyperrationalism.

“And that's how our deficient intelligence came about.”

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could they didn't stop or think of they should. Which brings us back to that famous Dartmouth conference in the summer of 1956 with the Cold War driving interest in artificial intelligence. There was a lot of money up for the taking and a conference of mathematicians and scientists from top tier universities and labs seemed like a pretty good investment. There was exactly one running computer program

that was operational and presented at the conference and it was the logic theory machine that had been developed by Alan Newell and Herbert Simon at the Rand Corporation. And it enshrined a particular vision of the human mind. Herbert Simon is famous for saying that human minds and modern digital computers are, quote unquote, species of the same genus. They are fundamentally the same, just a simple processing

machine that takes symbolic information as input, manipulates it according to a set of rules and outputs, decisions, solutions, judgments and so on. Body is no matter, society is a matter. One proposed measure of machine intelligence was something called the Turing Test. Name for its creator, British mathematician, Alan Turing, who you might remember from the movie the imitation game. We do like to play, play, it's a game, a test of songs. If you're

gender that says a man and a woman leave the room and the party goers have to figure out who's

“the man and who's the woman by sending questions back and forth on paper. And the man's job”

is to try to pretend to be the woman and the woman's job is to be herself. And he says, "What if we took the same test and replaced the man by a computer and the woman by any person?" And then the judge, of course, is meant to be able to figure out whether the machine is the

human or the human is the human. And what I have always found so shocking about the Turing Test

is that it reduces intelligence to telling a convincing lie to putting on the performance of being something that you're not. From the beginning with this disembodied conception of intelligence, the question that Turing posed, "What can the mind do without a body and therefore what might the machine do since it doesn't have one?" Chess was one of the first answers given why did

“they pick Chess? Well, the early days of artificial intelligence and the early days of computing”

are dominated by men. Mostly white men who were educated at elite institutions. Still at Chess was considered a universal marker of intelligence. White men wanted to call themselves universal and produce themselves in the machine.

The problem is that this small and homogeneous group of people has common biases and people

embed their own biases in technology. And so we see the blind spots of the creators then reflected in the technological artifacts that they create. They had all this hope and optimism about how fast they could accomplish their sci-fi inspired dreams of a sentient machine, a machine that could beat a human at Chess. But from the 1970s to the 1990s, it was a cycle of hype and disappointment. The technology was just not there yet and eventually the funding

dried up. Periods like this came to be known as AI Winters. I hesitate to use the term

in part because outside of the United States it was the 80s and 90s that really led to a

burgeoning of AI research and other parts of the world including both China and Russia. So it may have been a winter in America but it was a time of great creation and creativity and other parts of the world. The early pioneers of the field had underestimated the complexity of humans and overestimated the capabilities of machines.

“I think underneath all of that arrogance and hubris is a real lack of faith in people.”

He rejected everything that did not contribute directly to the progress of work. In fact, he rejected the man and made robot. The word robot means worker. It's a translation of the Slavic word for a "surf" for a slave for a servant. It originated in the early 20th century. Carl Capex play RUR, Rossum's universal robots. There are some of you who are in the future and imagine artificial humans and they were

manufactured. The sole purpose was nothing more or less than to prove that God was no longer necessary. In 1920, decades before the Dartmouth Conference, before the atomic bomb, before the mainframe computer. Rossum's universal robots grappled with the costs and consequences of treating workers as nothing more than their parts. It was an indictment of the exploitation and oppression that people had experienced for centuries in the name of progress.

A mistake which, in the play, man was repeating with machines. The robots are not people. They're more perfect than we are. They have an enormously developed intelligence that they can see, but they have no soul or an imitation. At the end of the play, the robots have brought about the downfall of humanity. Yet unable to reproduce their days are numbered. But then, two robots awaken to each other's presence,

and discover emotions previously thought exclusive to human time. Love blossoms between them, and a soul, stirs within. The sole is not often a subject for science. But long before he became a geneticist,

better understand who we are as human beings. I went to medical schools, and I found my atheism wasn't feeling like it settled very well. When I was sitting at the bedside of good honorable North Carolina people who were dying of diseases that we didn't have much to offer. And wondered how I would handle that and figured for some of these people, clearly their faith was a source of great comfort. So I began a two-year journey to try to understand why the people

believe in God. Ultimately, I began to realize the impoverishness that I felt from considering human

beings solely as mechanical entities and the appeal of the notion that there was something outside of that that fits into things like love and beauty, altruism and goodness and morality. Does our DNA tell us that that beautiful sunset was something to stop for just a moment and kind of be a little bit in awe? Does the way in which listening to Beethoven's third symphony

“bring me to tears? Is that written in my DNA? What is that about?”

Hi, this is Chelsea and Katie Colin from Philly. You're listening to MPR through life. This message comes from what was that like? What does it feel like to be attacked by an alligator, survive a plane crash, or when the showcase on the prices right? Real people share their most surreal moments on what was that like? An apple podcast, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now. Can you tell me the story of your ancestor? Deep blue? Certainly. Part three,

souls of silicon. The match was held on the 35th floor of a skyscraper in downtown Manhattan, with a large crowd of onlookers and a throng of journalists and cameras. Gary Kasparov considered one of the greatest chess players of all time. Yes, I was confident.

“Yeah, that's the confidence arrogance. Let's remember that before 1997, I haven't lost a single match”

during it. I was unbeatable at the chessboard. He went up against the machine, IBM Super Computer,

Deep Blue, capable of analyzing 200 million positions per second. Last year in Philadelphia,

Kasparov won against a slower weaker version of Deep Blue. This rematch, played in Manhattan, was seen as the ultimate test of man against machine. I couldn't say no, it was too tempting. You know, it's just it's understanding better relations with the humans and computers. You know, we're very important for our progress. Trying to just to find out what are the limits of computers. The atmosphere was tense as the players sat down at the chessboard,

Kasparov with a focused, determined expression, and Deep Blue with its bank of blinking lights

and silent fans. The game began. Kasparov made his first move with a steady hand. Deep Blue responded

with a move of its son, calculated with lightning speed. It became clear that both players were evenly matched. Kasparov's experience and intuition were met with a machine's raw computational power, and ability to analyze large amounts of data. The bishop can easily fall victim to what we call an overload tactic. When one piece has to put so many pieces. Grabbing in the sitter of Baku in the deep south of the USSR,

watched my parents trying to sort chess puzzle. I cannot give you any more information because nobody was there to tweet about this moment when Gary Kasparov discovered chess. And I climbed very rapidly on this chess ladder,

“and so how is Kasparov going to draw up some sort of miracle attack from the school?”

First thing, Danny, they look frightful. He's famous for certain tactical swoops.

Rook takes the knife like God.

“That was the junior champion under 18 of the USSR at his 12, 17, the world champion of the”

20 and the 22 world champion, and kept the title 15 years. From the onset of the computer science, they all thought about chess, the game of chess, as being an ultimate test for machines and intelligence. Even before my famous matches with the blue in 1996-1997, we, when I say we, top players, we already suffered some of the defeats against this chess

engines in Blitz, five minutes chess, or in the rapid chess, 25 minutes chess. So when I faced the blue, it was already like a sign on the wall.

“Gary is nah, he looks. I mean, he looks. We very, are we missing something on the chess board now”

the Kaspar of C's? In the end, it was deep blue who emerged victorious. With Kaspar of conceding defeat after the machine's 19th move in the sixth game,

the match was a historic moment, marking the first time a machine had defeated a

reigning world champion in a match under tournament conditions. I was really, you know, few rows that I wanted to come back and just to hear this machine down. It was painful. I was really angry, but most of it was myself. So it was a clear sign for me that the history of us competing with machines will be over soon. There's a lovely article that comes out in the New York Times in the wake of Kaspar

of losing that says, "Well, it makes sense that the computer won at chess." Chess is a small problem, but I want to see if a computer will ever be able to beat a world champion at the game go for which there are more board positions than Adams in the universe, and it's a really exact and clear example of the so-called receding horizon, where people really want to reserve something for ourselves that is not recognizable. What is it that is uniquely human? Maybe it's our ability

to write a poem, or maybe it's intuition, whatever that is. Maybe it's certain forms of creativity, or certain types of emotion, and then people try to automate those things. We then redefine our humaneness to gain and gain. Kasparov's defeat marked a turning point. A computer had beaten a human at a game humans taught it to play. For scientists, it was a sign that maybe it was time to stop competing with

machines, and start collaborating with them. He felt that he had learned the language in which God created the universe. Today we are learning the language which God created. Now I'd like to invite Dr. Francis Collins to the lecture. I had plenty of occasions to imagine having to give the speech where I would say basically we failed we give up.

When geneticist Francis Collins and his team first embarked on the human genome project,

it was a daunting task. They wanted to map out the order of the three billion base pairs

that made up a tiny molecule, our DNA, and just over a decade, they did it. Mr. President, distinguished ambassadors, ladies and gentlemen, it is truly a humble humbling and profound experience to be asked to speak here this morning. On June 26th, 2000, in the East Room of the White House, I had my chance to talk about what this meant and to give a big shout out to those 2400 scientists who made it possible.

“And I think all of us, one level or another, were also thinking about this in terms of its implications”

for who we are, and maybe even theologically, we are doing something pretty profound here.

We're reading our own instruction book and we're part of that and we're watching it emerge

“day by day and putting all that information up on the internet as fast as we get it.”

During that same time, hardware gets we cheaper computers proliferate and there was a big

breakthrough in a subfield of artificial intelligence called neural nets.

This ushered in this new era in artificial intelligence, the era of machine learning. So what if we didn't try to model the human mind first? What if we didn't try to encode human knowledge first? What if we let the computer learn on its own? What you do when you build one of these systems is you get a ton of data and you feed it into the computer and you say a computer, I want you to create a model of the patterns that you see in the data and the computer are very

obligingly makes a model of the mathematical patterns that it sees in the data. These massive data

sets were suddenly feasible to store and process in computer memory which hit sort of being prohibitively

expensive before. It's the beginning of a feature of medicine. It's the end of ignorance. Gene-based medicine drug discovery, drug development and curing diseases. Some have said to me that sequencing the human genome will diminish humanity by taking the mystery out of life. You know, we're chemical computers. This is the program that runs us. Nothing could be further from the truth. There's a deep desire for the human condition not to be a deterministic output of our chemical

or genetic or cultural forces, but for there to be something that allows for free will and

surprise and creativity that belongs to us. Math is a system of symbolic logic. It is not

the indefensible thing that makes us human. When you are building a computer program, it'll work if you do it this way and then it won't work if you do it the other way. But that's not how culture operates. That's not how relationships work. So there's a really fundamental difference between what we can do with computers and what we can do in society. Because when it comes around to it, computers are machines that do math.

They compute. And we forget that when we get grandiose about artificial intelligence. So we get grandiose about our imaginations. Then I'm just imagining a world in which, you know, you have more intelligent machines operating on humans. Are the decisions those machines are making in those moments, which, you know, for humans, for example, you might make informed by instinct without that, you know, is something missing. Or without that, are you making

“viewer mistakes? Sometimes the gut feeling is not when you should have followed.”

So Dr. Frankstein, you know, creates life, right? Out of dead matter. In a way, that's what we do with AI as well. We take dead matter. It's like, you know, silicone chips and wires and metals and whatnot, you know, and put them together and then called them and boom. Artificial intelligence is becoming a sort of black box with law enforcement. Google uses AI and misinformation spreads wildly on Google. The Chinese Communist Party

is using this technology to build the ultimate surveillance state. Look, I'm, I'm in the core of your business by nature. So that's why, yeah, I grew up in the Soviet Union. Yes, and I saw the collapse of democracy in Russia, and I still believe that, you know, the history of humanity gives us reasons to be optimistic. I'd like to imagine a future where we have built, we have developed human systems that bring the best out of us rather than the worst out of us.

I think it's, it's a time where we have to reconsider, you know, this is how in this new environment, which is dominated by computers, we can find a robust democracy because no one's still

“have monopoly for evil. And that's why, you know, let's stop, you know, worrying about the”

determined haters and metrics. Let's recognize that it's a bit, it's about us. Machine is like a mirror, and if you don't like what we're seeing in the mirror, you have two choices.

The lack of decision is just, it's a result for disaster.

“That's it for this week's show. I'm Randhaktit Fata.”

I'm Ramteen Adablui, and you've been listening to "Throughline" from NPR.

This episode was produced by me. And me and chatGPT launched with Julie Kane.

Onions timer, Yolanda, Sanguine, Casey minor, Cristina Kim, Devon Cardiama. Your Donos to sphazio.

“Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel.”

Thank you to Olivia Chilkodi, Devon Cardiama, she here Khan, and Magdalena de Vorgiaqva for their voiceover work. Thanks also to the Clinton Presidential Library, YouTube creator Brian Kay,

“Micah Rattner, Rachel Seller, Taylor Ash, Olivia Chilkodi, Ryan Mitchell,”

Tomar Charny, and Ania Grunman. This episode was mixed by Alex J. Wenskis. Music for this episode was composed by Ramteen and his band "Drop Electric", which includes Ania, Mizani, Naveed, Marvy, show Fujiwara.

And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show,

please write us at [email protected]. Thanks for listening. This message comes from everything everywhere daily. One of the world's most popular daily education podcasts. In about 10 minutes, you'll learn something new about history, science, geography, and more.

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