AI Skeptics: The Rich People Episode (with Tom Adams)
Our very own Tom Adams came to talk to us this week about rich people and medical advice from AI:
AI Skeptics: The Psychedelic Computer Brain (With Andy Smart)
AI Skeptics: The early internet (with Betty O’Neil)
I’ve been away for two weeks so I’m catching up on blogging about my podcasts! This one is from two weeks ago with my dear nerdy mom Betty O’Neil. She explains who really invented email!
AI Skeptics: Section 230 (With Nancy Costello)
This week we were super lucky to have Michigan State Law Professor Nancy Costello on, explaining the past, present, and future of Section 230 and how it applies to social media platforms:
AI Skeptics: Social Media is the New Tobacco (with Tom Adams)
I forgot to post this episode last week! And that’s kinda dumb, because it was very timely a week ago, talking about the recent lawsuits that were won against the social media platforms:
AI Skeptics: Should Judges Use AI? (with Shlomo Klapper)
Hello friends! This week we talked to Shlomo Klapper, who runs Learned Hand and a great WaPo oped about AI and joined us to talk about helping judges with AI:
AI Skeptics: The Kidd Lab Episode (with Celeste Kidd)
Hello friends! Join us this week for a fascinating conversation on how we change our minds with UC Berkeley Psychology professor Celeste Kidd.
AI Skeptics: We’re Not Moving to Mars (With Adam Becker)
Hellos, friends! Listen to a very fun episode with Adam Becker discussing his new excellent book, More Everything Forever, with the AI Skeptics!
AI Skeptics: AI in Philanthropy (with Katy Knight and Sherry Wong)
This week’s podcast was an amazing conversation with Katy Knight, the Executive Director of the Siegal Family Endowment, and Sherry Wong, our good friend and OCEAN’s board director. We talked about AI in philanthropy, the past, present, and future. Take a listen and tell me what you think!
AI Skeptics: How to Think about Writing in the Age of AI (with John Warner)
Hello friends! Jake and I had an amazing time reading a wonderful book by John Warner called More than Words and chatting with the author. Take a listen if you have time!
AI Skeptics: Sex Ed for Ed Tech (with Kiri Soares)
Hello friends! Please find a moment to listen to this week’s AI Skeptics episode with my very good friend Kiri Soares, a (retiring!) principal of a 6-12 school in Brooklyn. She’s talking here about Ed Tech and AI, and how she frames it as a risk akin to sex or drugs. Fascinating!
AI Skeptics: The Future of Work (With Kevin Frazier)
Hello, friends! And good morning! If we’re all done wiping away our tears of joy at last night’s Bad Bunny performance (if not the football score), take a moment to listen to the newest AI Skeptics podcast. This week we talked with legal scholar and AI optimist Kevin Frazier about the future of work.
AI Skeptics Podcast: The AI Bubble Episode (with Tom Adams)
Guys! This is a timely subject, we think! Listen to us predict the bursting of the AI bubble:
AI Skeptics Podcast: All Buzzwords Mean Surveillance (with Sherry Wong)
Hello friends! I’m psyched (and somewhat late due to the snowstorm) to share this week’s podcast with our good friend Sherry Wong:
AI Skeptics podcast: The Braverman Episode
I’m very psyched to announce the newest AI Skeptics podcast episode, the Braverman Episode, in which Jake and I interview my good friend Nicole Aschoff (I learned about her a long long time ago) about her and our favorite book.
New AI Skeptics Podcast: We are all AI Skeptics now (except for our AI Overlords)
It’s Monday, so there’s a new AI Skeptics podcast, called We are all AI Skeptics now (except for our AI Overlords):
New AI Skeptics Podcast: AI versus Artists and Educators
Here’s the newest AI Skeptics podcast, which comes out every Monday morning!
It’s with Becky Jaffe, and we talk about AI in her fields of art and education.
I hope you enjoy it! Please comment below, or ask for new topics for the podcast!
New podcast!! AI Skeptics
I’m very psyched to tell you all that I finally belong to the 2020’s, because I have started a podcast with my friend and colleague Jake Appel. It’s called the AI Skeptics, and it’s a new project of my non-profit OCEAN.
Each episode is between 30 and 35 minutes long, so it’s a really pretty short dive into the topics, but we hope it’s also fun and thought-provoking.
Here’s the art:
So far we have five episodes, with new ones coming early Monday mornings. Here are some links:
Episode 1: Hello world (with Celeste Kidd)
Episode 2: Does anybody actually care about AI ethics? (with Aaron Abrams)
Episode 3: Don’t trust AI!
Episode 4: Wait, can Trump actually make AI regulation illegal? (with Tom Adams)
Episode 5: Recession for the young and creepy AI toys
I hope you all enjoy it! Please give comments and tell me what you think! I’m especially excited for this coming Monday’s episode.
The impending crypto market crash
I have deeply disliked crypto ever since, way back in Occupy, we at Alternative Banking had a visit from some Bitcoin evangelists who were claiming that Bitcoin and the blockchain would somehow make banking more fair and democratic.
They couldn’t explain their reasoning, though, and just tried to get us all to sign up and start harvesting coins, which at the time, probably 2012, was kind of easy. But I wouldn’t do it, on the principle that it was a useless thing of no intrinsic value, and a huge waste of energy to boot. Come back when you can get rewarded for saving energy instead of wasting it, I remember saying.
I looked at the news this morning and realized that I was interested in back then, and why I joined Occupy in the first place, has come full circle to crypto.
Namely, the idea that the government (at the time, the Obama administration) was propping up a market (the mortgage securities specifically and the stock market more generally) for political reasons, which meant that the folks who should have been out of their jobs and possibly charged with crimes were getting off with their multimillion dollar year-end bonuses.
It seemed outrageous that nobody was losing their shirt except for the victims of the whole scam, because it was political suicide to allow the markets to collapse. And this was especially true because so many people had been convinced to invest their retirement in the stock market. As pensions were replaced by stock portfolios, it became a requirement to never allow stocks to dip too low for too long. And the result was truly non-natural and perverted.
I wasn’t the only one to be outraged, of course. The Tea Party was founded on the notion that somehow the borrowers for these loans – especially folks of color, for some mysterious reason – were somehow to blame.
Well here we are, back at the apex of a bubble, this time in cryptocurrency instead of weird hyper-inflated mortgage securities. But this time it’s not just that “Americans won’t be happy” if the bubble bursts, because they were convinced to put their retirement into that bubble. This time it’s Trump and his actual family that is so heavily invested in crypto that they personally stand to lose billions of dollars if and when the bubble bursts.
Which leads me to wonder, what will they end up doing to prevent this particular bubble from bursting? I don’t know, but I’m guessing it will be really gross.
What’s the right way to talk about AI?
Yesterday I came across this article in the Atlantic, written by Matteo Wong, entitled The AI Industry is Radicalizing.
It makes a strong case that, while the hype men are over-hyping the new technology, the critics are too dismissive. Wong quotes Emily Bender and Alex Hanna’s new book The AI Con as describing it as “a racist pile of linear algebra”.
Full disclosure: about a week before their title was announced, which is like a year and a half ago, I was thinking of writing a book similar in theme, and I even had a title in mind, which was “The AI Con”! So I get it. And to be clear I haven’t read Bender and Hanna’s entire book, so it’s possible they do not actually dismiss it.
And yet, I think Wong has a point. AI not going away, it’s real, it’s replacing people at their job, and we have to grapple with it seriously.
Wong goes on to describe the escalating war, sometimes between Gary Marcus and the true believers. The point is, Wong argues, they are arguing about the wrong thing.
Critical line here: Who cares if AI “thinks” like a person if it’s better than you at your job?
What’s a better way to think about this? Wong has two important lines towards answering this question.
Ignoring the chatbot era or insisting that the technology is useless distracts from more nuanced discussions about its effects on employment, the environment, education, personal relationships, and more.
Automation is responsible for at least half of the nation’s growing wage gap over the past 40 years, according to one economist.
I’m with Wong here. Let’s take it seriously, but not pretend it’s the answer to anyone’s dreams, except the people for whom it’s making billions of dollars. Like any technological tool, it’s going to make our lives different but not necessarily better, depending on the context. And given how many contexts AI is creeping into, there are a ton of ways to think about it. Let’s focus our critical minds on those contexts.
mathbabe 