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Home » Discussion: The A.I. Dilemma – March 9, 2023 (Transcript)

Discussion: The A.I. Dilemma – March 9, 2023 (Transcript)

In this discussion, Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin present how existing A.I. capabilities already pose catastrophic risks to a functional society, how A.I. companies are caught in a race to deploy as quickly as possible without adequate safety measures, and what it would mean to upgrade our institutions to a post-A.I. world. This presentation was given before the launch of GPT-4.

Listen to the MP3 Audio here:

TRANSCRIPT:

Steve Wozniak – Apple

Hello, Steve Wozniak from Apple. I’m here to introduce Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin and they’re the co-founders of the Center for Humane Technology. They were behind the Emmy-winning Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma. The Social Dilemma reached 100 million people in 190 countries in 30 languages and they’ve also advised the heads of state, global policy makers, members of Congress, national security leaders, in addition to mobilizing the millions of us about these issues and some of the dangers that we face with technology these days.

So here they are.

AZA RASKIN: The reason why we started with that video is, one, it’s the first time I’ve seen AI that made me feel something and there was a threshold that we crossed; and the second is it was a very curious experience that we had trying to explain to reporters what was going on.

So this was January of last year, at that point there were maybe 100 people playing with this new technology. Now there are 10 million people having generated over a billion images and trying to explain to reporters what was about to happen and we’d walk them through how the technology worked and that you would type in some text and it would make an image that had never been seen before and they would nod along and at the end they’d be like, cool, and what was the image database you got your images from?

THE RUBBER BAND EFFECT

And it was just clear that we’d like stretched their mind like a rubber band and then because this was a brand new capability, a brand new paradigm, their minds would snap back, and it’s not like dumb reporters, it’s like a thing that we all experience and even in making this presentation so many times realizing we have to expand our minds, and then we look somewhere else and it snaps back and we just wanted to name that experience, because if you’re anything like us that’ll happen to your minds throughout this presentation, especially at the end when you go home you’d be like, wait, what did we just see?

TRISTAN HARRIS: And I think because artificial intelligence is such an abstract thing and it affects so many things and doesn’t have the grounding metaphors like the kinesthetic experience in our lives that it’s so hard to kind of wrap your head around how transformational this is.