artificial intelligence has gone from
science fiction to almost everyday
reality now and it's changing our lives
in really profound ways I think
personally speaking it's one of the most
exciting developments that I've
encountered at Wired and I'm curious
just to turn it over to both of you and
to talk about this Joe is the expert so
I'm gonna defer to him but my my general
observation as you said is that it is
seeping into our lives in all sorts of
ways that we just don't notice and part
of the reason is because the way we
think about AI is colored by popular
culture and by science fiction and I
know it's a familiar distinction to a
lot of your readers between general AI
and specialized AI a specialized AI is
really the stuff that we've been doing
for quite some time we're just getting
better and better at it and that is
figuring out using algorithms whether
computers can figure out increasingly
complex tasks and we're seeing that
happen in every aspect of our lives from
medicine to transportation to how
electricity is distributed and it
promises to create a vastly more
productive and efficient economy and if
properly harnessed can generate enormous
prosperity for people opportunity for
people can cure diseases that we haven't
seen before
can make us safer because it eliminates
inherent human error in a lot of work
but it also has some downsides that
we're gonna have to figure out in terms
of if not eliminating jobs requiring
people to think differently about their
occupations
it could increase inequality and we've
seen that in technology generally in
globalization it can suppress wages and
so we're gonna have to develop new
social constructs in order to embrace
fully and and optimize this this new
technology in science-fiction what you
hear about is generalized AI right so
computers start getting smarter and we
are eventually conclude that we're not
all that useful and then off we go off
we go you know or you know either
they're you know drugging us and keeping
us fat and happy or you know we're in
the matrix we're living in a simulation
yeah or we're living in a simulation now
and yeah Joey's saved there's a lot more
my impression based on talking to my top
Sciences advisors is is that we're still
a reasonably long way away from that
kind of generalized AI it's worth
thinking about only because it stretches
our imaginations and it gets us to think
about what our core values and issues of
choice and free will that actually do
have some significant applications for
specialized AI but generally speaking
that's probably not the thing that we
need to worry about the most right now
we need to figure out how do we get
what's already happening around us but
it's just going to be more and more
incorporated during our daily lives how
do we get that right I think this may
upset some of my students at MIT but one
of them the concerns that I have about
AI is it's been predominantly male gang
of kids mostly white who were more
comfortable talking to computers and
human beings that have been building the
core computer science around AI and not
all but a lot of them feel that if they
could just make that science fiction
general AI we wouldn't have to worry
about all the messy stuff like politics
and Society and there's almost like a
church of this belief in
headquartered in Silicon Valley and so I
that's a concern because I think a lot
of people figure that the machines will
just figure it all out right and they
underestimate the difficulty and I feel
like this is the year that artificial
intelligence becomes not just a computer
science problem but something that the
white house that I've been working very
closely with a friar in the Dominican
Order I was trying to understand you
know Bitcoin encryption in AI from the
perspective of the Catholics and so so I
think that that a lot of other people
need to be involved and the difficulty
has been that the computer science
community they're not an easy gang to
talk to and so and I think you know the
white house your your team and yourself
I'm you've you've probably gotten your
head around this more than any other
anybody else in history and it's good
timing because I think everybody needs
to understand it and I think that that's
that's that's it that's a key piece I
think it's and we use at the Media Lab
we're using the term extended
intelligence because we don't think it's
going to be us and an AI AI just like
Google just like everything will be
built into the laws and to the
government into society and how that
behaves is important and it's like the
Internet and when we were doing a lot of
the early work on the internet we
thought it would just solve democracy
writers just get better but now you've
got these I didn't work out so well and
we do think that we can push the
pendulum back
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