301 | Tina Eliassi-Rad on Al, Networks, and Epistemic Instability
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Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
1h 11m
3 speakers
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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. There's a kind of history myth that sometimes gets promulgated in, I don't know, elementary schools, maybe, or just folk tales we tell each other. According to which, when the first European explorers landed in the New World... The indigenous folks saw them and thought, oh, my goodness, these are gods coming to visit us and we need to worship them and they're too powerful to deal with. Turns out nothing like that is actually true. This is a story that the Europeans made up after the fact to make themselves look good, justify some of the things that happened. Nowadays, we are being faced with a new set of visitors from another world, namely artificial intelligences, whether it's large language models or some other kind of constructed program that in many ways can act human, but has a different set of capacities and we're learning to deal with them.
And unlike the myth of the European explorers landing in the Western Hemisphere, today there are a bunch of people who quite literally who are very willing to say that these are gods coming to deal with us. I know there's also plenty of skepticism out there, but there are people who think not only that AIs are gods, going to be in our human-level intelligence and agency, but well beyond that, superhuman, godlike creatures that we're going to have to deal with. I am myself not of that opinion. I do not think that that is actually what is going on. But just like the landing explorers, AIs do have different capacities than we do. They're trained, of course. They're designed. They're made to, in many ways, act very human. But they're really not. They're thinking in a different way. They're capable of some things much better than we are and other things not nearly as good as we are. So how do we think about this?
This world in which interacting with AIs, interacting with computerized systems more broadly is going to be a crucially important part of how we live our lives. Today's guest is Tina Eliassi-Rod, who is a computer scientist whose work spans the space. And this is why I really like it. From very technical stuff, just, you know, how do you better detect things? certain nodes or communities in an abstract network that you have embedded as some sort of data, but then also the human side of how you deal with this stuff, how these computer systems, how these AIs are going to affect our lives and we're going to affect them all the way up to human AI co-evolution. Once we build these systems and then we interact with them and then we use them to decide how to go shopping or decide how to find a romantic partner, guess what? That affects who we are, how we live our lives, and the survival strategies we're going to have to move forward in this very brave new world. Again, many positive aspects here. There are things that, you know,
We don't want to do, we don't want to bother doing or it's hard to do for us as human beings that we can outsource to the AIs. There are other ways in which it's very dangerous. The biases, the bad things that we have in our own brains can be inherited by the AIs and they can have new failure modes that we human beings don't have. It's a world that is changing super duper rapidly, obviously, as a lot of research is coming in and a lot of influences are out there. It's not all about necessarily writing the best program. Some people who are very good at writing programs want to optimize for making the best money, right?
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