World Brain: No Experts
Matt Brandabur, Yuri Marder
Taking the HG Wells essay collection as a departure point, this podcast asks the following questions of a range of people:
What has been awakened? Rough beast? Benevolent angel? Boring super-appliance?
Could we be less wrong about AI than those considered to be experts?
Why "No Experts"? Is it possible that there really are any experts on this subject?
Could a few relatively smart outsiders be less wrong about AI - what it is, what changes it's going to make to our lives - than the glory-drunk founders and their whorish enablers, or the terrifying doomsayers?
Could we be any less wrong, for that matter, than Wells, who in 1938 brought out a collection of essays that imagined that a global encyclopedia would help bring about a permanent state of world peace?
Finally, can an unstructured discussion between humans meaningfully enrich our understanding of the boundaries between us and what we've created?