Can We Tame AI Before It’s Too Late? With Dr. Gary Marcus

The Data Chief

Key Moments:

• Disappointment With Today’s AI Systems (4:00)
• Congressional Inaction And The Need for AI Regulation (9:00)
• The Seduction of AI Propaganda (15:00)
• The Misguided Hypothesis of "Scale is All You Need" (23:00)
• Don’t Be Fooled by the Masters of AI Hype (27:00)
• The Global AI Race and the Need for International Cooperation (33:00)

Key Quotes:

• “This matters. It matters as much as immigration policy or financial policy. The tech policy that we set right now is going to really affect the rest of our lives.”
• “We should want to have AI that can be like an oracle that can answer any question. There is value in trying to build such a technology. But, we don't actually have that technology. A lot of people are seduced into thinking that we do. But it may be decades away.”
• “Nobody can look you in the eye and say, ‘I understand how human intelligence works’. If they say that, they're lying to you. It's still an unexplored domain.”

Mentions:

• Taming Silicon Valley: How We Can Ensure AI Works for All Of Us
• Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind
• The Algebraic Mind: Integrating Connectionism and Cognitive Science (Learning, Development, and Conceptual Change)
• The EU AI Act
• AI Generates Covertly Racist Decisions About People Based On Their Dialect

Dr. Gary Marcus Bio:

Gary Marcus is a leading voice in artificial intelligence. He is a scientist, best-selling author, and serial entrepreneur (Founder of Robust.AI and Geometric.AI, acquired by Uber). He is well-known for his challenges to contemporary AI, anticipating many of the current limitations decades in advance, and for his research in human language development and cognitive neuroscience.

An Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU, he is the author of six books, including, The Algebraic Mind, Kluge, The Birth of the Mind, the New York Times Bestseller Guitar Zero, and most recently Taming Silicon Valley: How We Can Ensure AI Works for All of Us. He has often contributed to The New Yorker, Wired, and The New York Times.

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