Matt Clifford

This week, we're back to a simple but pretty uncomfortable question, which is, might AI just be a normal technology?

something that maybe really doesn't deserve great fear and frenzy.

And our guest today is Arvind Narayan.

He's the director of Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy.

He's a really interesting voice.

He's a challenge to Yoshua Bengio, who you heard last week, because he thinks that it's not very likely or that actually we're over-focusing on the end of humanity existential threat.

But at the same time, he's a challenge to a lot of the people that are hyping the technology because he's saying, in many ways, this stuff is much less reliable than we think.

And even once it gets more reliable, it's going to take decades for some of these things to be adopted, not a few months.

And therefore, the change that AI is going to bring is going to be much more gradual.

So it's probably a very, very sane, thoughtful, challenging voice, one that maybe isn't heard as much because it doesn't necessarily suit either the end-of-the-world-is-nigh people or the

AI is going to change the universe tomorrow, people, because he's suggesting that a lot of the issues are just around how humans do or do not adopt technology.

Here's a taster.

And to listen to the full episode, sign up at therestispolitics.com.

There's a really interesting thing as an outsider that one observes, which is one will get Elon Musk saying there's a 20% chance it's going to destroy humanity, and Sam Altman says it's going to end the world, but in the meantime, it's going to lead to some great companies with great machine learning.

And then suddenly you'll get, you know, Gary Marcus will pop up and say, this is all completely overblown.

There's only a 1% chance it's going to eliminate everybody, right?

But of course, if one thinks about this, I think Joshua's point was it doesn't matter if it's a 1% chance, a half percent chance, a 0.1% chance.

What the hell are you guys thinking about?

I mean-

You're gambling, right?