Episode Details

Is artificial intelligence here to solve every wicked and intractable problem our society currently faces? Will it morph into Skynet and become a paperclip maximiser that eradicates humanity to optimise for paperclip manufacturing? Will it just slowly degrade our information, political and economic systems? Will it be a net positive for a very small, very powerful and very rich group of white men and create uncertainty and insecurity for the remainder? AI is one of my favourite topics to get into on this show and this week I have Anna Goldsworthy here to chat about it after the release of her recent Quarterly essay; The God We Made, The Threat and Promise of Artificial Intelligence.

As someone who recently got the redundancy bullet from an organisation that’s gone into a strategic alliance with one of the biggest AI companies in the world, and who before that saw the pernicious and quite strange ways by which it was being espoused as the elixir to all things human, I was really looking forward to reading Anna’s work and spending some time with her. As you’ll hear in the chat, I don’t have the most optimist view on where this is all going and the case outlined is an unsettling one. Anna’s essay though circles one fundamental question - how to live wisely and agreeably and well? Does AI help this or harm our individual and collective aspirations for life on this planet? There’s myriad answers and potential pathways and this is where context matters. When the context is that a very small number of players are in charge of where this technology goes, when the underlying political and economic system is about growth - no matter if it’s harmful or reckless or generating ghost GDP - and when previous and ongoing calamity and crisis has barely touched the side of a western development mindset, I find it hard not to be cynical about how AI has and will continue to shape and affect our lives.

Anna is an unusual voice in this debate which made speaking to her more compelling. A pianist and teacher, her career in academia doesn’t indicate that writing about AI was going to be a feature of her work. It’s entirely relevant though when we step back to see how music, the arts and culture more broadly have been and are transmitted through personal relations, something AI and our compulsive relationship to any and all screens intervenes on. In this conversation we speak a little about some of the darker, more existential perils of the suite of technologies that make up AI, more than that though we talk about what it means to be human and how our humanity has been and is affected by technology. And in AI the threat of losing connection, agency, dignity, meaning and our sense of reality seems possible, if not entirely likely.

In the God we Made, Anna makes the argument that we always seemed to know it was going to happen. Prometheus stole fire, pandora opened the box, Icarus flew too close to the sun, Oppenheimer built the bomb. Is that what we’re about to do?

Check out the Pope's Encyclical Letter On Safeguarding The Human Person In The Time Of Artificial Intelligence. 

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