The Promise and Terror of Artificial Intelligence

<p>Cyber’s intro music has clips from various movies. The first is from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbqMuvnx5MU" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em>WarGames</em></a>, a 1983 film where a hacker squares off against an artificial intelligence that’s in control of the nukes. Almost forty years later and AI is beating people at <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/9kpwkv/watch-deepmind-ai-tackle-starcraft-2" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em>Starcraft 2</em></a>, which is not quite the organization of a <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xkj3p/nuclear-war-artificial-intelligence" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">nuclear war</a> but can still feel scary.&nbsp;</p><p><br></p><p>But how smart are these systems really? Is AI, or “machine learning” as practitioners prefer to call it, the next big thing or just another in a series of promises about the future that hasn’t quite materialized? What are the actual dangers of these systems?</p><p><br></p><p>Here to help us answer this question is <a href="https://ironholds.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Os Keyes</a>. Keyes is PhD student at the University of Washington’s Department of Human Centred Design &amp; Engineering and an occasional <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjdkbv/a-better-body-is-possible-these-anarchist-biohackers-want-to-build-it" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Motherboard contributor</a>. Their area of expertise is, broadly, how technology constructs the world we live in.</p><p><br></p><p>It’s a wide-ranging conversation that covers everything from Henry Kissinger to <em>Human Centipede </em>and the hard limits of artificial intelligence.</p> &#10;&nbsp;<br /><hr><p style='color: grey; font - size: 0.75em; '>See <a style='color: grey; ' target='_blank' rel='noopener noreferrer' href='https://acast.com/privacy'>acast.com/privacy</a> for privacy and opt-out information.</p>