Artificial intelligence: A force for good, or existential threat? Conrad and Jon try to separate real issues from unfounded fears and discuss the near future of AI.
Dang, looked up the Wikipedia pages of Conrad, Stephen, and their father Hugo. And their maternal grandmother was a pioneering criminologist! Amazing family!
Great talk. First, at the 'big picture' level, society has not been at equilibrium since the invention of the steam engine, if not before. What we have now is the acceleration of change. Most of what I learned as a maths major 50 years ago related to computation is totally obsolete (The 'pure' bits are still relevant, just a lot more of it.) What I would like to see is the democratization of the tools to do work in this area, and WL is at the forefront. The main thing I would like to see here is the ability to use the Mac's GPUs for hardware acceleration of neural nets (etc.) so I can explore stuff on my own -- I think a lot of other people would like that. Remember that personal computers were invented by hippies who wanted their own machine to explore stuff -- stuff that the corporate controllers of mainframes at the time would not see the use of.
when attempting to answer this question, using Wolfram computation theory, i find myself in the same quandary as with quantum physics. the maths are amazing, and certainly say something about the nature of time, material and space, but it lacks an intuitive interpretation about how the physical world actually does these calculations?
also i think man is afraid that the AI might enable certain aspects of his own nature that he would rather not see, i mean we control the AI, not the other way round, and it will reflect our intent for better or worse :)
Disappointed! I was hoping to hear an interesting technical conversation not a reiteration of Empire -- that ai powered weapons would be fine in the hands of the "big stable wealthy" countries but not others! Regrettably a very blinkered view.
