philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

The experts are divided on AI’s future. For now, that’s good

... Ultimately, the most unassailable takes came from the speakers who took pains not to have a take, such as DeepMind cofounder Shane Legg. “I don’t believe the people who are sure it’s going to go very well, and I don’t believe the people who are sure it’s going to go very, very badly,” he said. ...

Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist, ended his TED AI talk by saying he expects that the potential for AI to go badly wrong would result in “people [starting] to work in unprecedented collaborative ways out of their own self-interest.” I can’t quite tell whether that sentiment is utopian or dystopian. ...

I won’t try to convince you to stop worrying about what could be ahead—some of it, I worry about myself—but any analysis that fails to consider the ways AI is already a boon to humanity is incomplete. ...

See the full story here: https://www.fastcompany.com/90968556/ted-ai-andrew-ng-max-tegmark-shane-legg

At TED AI 2023, experts debate whether we’ve created “the new electricity”

... University of Southern California professor Phebe Vayanos also spoke about the need to prevent AI-powered decisions from disadvantaging marginalized communities. ...

Boeree spoke about the so-called "Moloch problem," a well-known parable in some AI communities, which pulls from the Biblical story of Moloch as a metaphor of sacrificing long-term consequences for short-term gain. She spoke about the unhealthy competition that comes from "crappy incentives," as she put it, that drive AI companies to rapidly and perhaps recklessly seek advanced systems because everyone else is doing it. Her talk earned one of the rare standing ovations of the day. ...

Aviv Regev, executive vice president at Genentech Research and Early Development, talked about the promise of using AI for drug discovery. Judging by audience reactions, these medical moments felt like cathartic vindication of AI as a positive force in society amid prevalent nervousness and skepticism over AI's potentially negative impacts. ...

So then, if TED AI 2023 might conclude one thing, it's that AI technology plus human ingenuity may replace a human working alone. ...

See this full story here: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/10/ted-ai-2023-a-historic-symposium-on-benefits-risks-and-applications-of-ai/