World Brain: No Experts

technology, society, culture, philosophy · EN

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?