Are You There Siri? It’s Me, Margaret: A Look at The Rapidly Changing World of AI

Happy New Year from The Takeaway! As we take our first steps into the year 2018, we are diving into a rapidly changing technology that has the ability to completely reshape our future: Artificial intelligence. Here’s what you’ll find during this special podcast episode:

• Queena visits the artificial intelligence lab for the Chinese tech giant Baidu in the heart of Silicon Valley to find out what their AI lead researcher, Gregory Diamos, is up to.

• What exactly is artificial intelligence (AI), and how is it becoming integrated into our daily lives? For a brief history of AI, and for a look at where it might be headed, we turn to Joanna Bryson. She’s an associate professor at University of Bath and an affiliate at Princeton University.  

• As we rely more and more on AI and machine learning, what do we have to worry about, and how can we mitigate these risks? Sam Harris, a neuroscientist, author, and host of the Waking Up Podcast, says artificial intelligence presents one of the most important questions of our time, and might not be the great solution of the future.

• In the world of artificial intelligence, there’s an idea that’s captured the imagination of everyone from Elon Musk to Stephen Hawking: Singularity. Rob Nail, CEO of Singularity University, explains what singularity is, and why the bigwigs in Silicon Valley are taken so taken with it.

• What does the future look like? The Takeaway has been exploring that question in our special series, “Earth: 2067.” We’ve asked science fiction writers to imagine what the world will look like 50 years into the future, and today we hear Saci Lloyd. She’s the author of satirical science fiction works like “Momentum” and “The Carbon Diaries.”

• We interact with different human-presenting AI interfaces more and more. Siri, Alexa, Google Home, Cortana all have a female voice as their default. How do these AI personal assistants respond to harassing language? Not very well, according to Leah Fessler, a reporter for Quartz.

• How will AI change the way we are as humans? How has it already changed us? We delve into questions of relationships, love, kindness, and what art can teach us about how we should interact with AI with Charlie Yu, a science fiction writer who was a story editor for season one of the HBO hit series “Westworld.”

This episode is hosted by Queena Kim and Todd Zwillich