332 - Guest: James Barrat, Author and Filmmaker, part 1

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .

Back in 2013 my attention was taken by a book called Our Final Invention, which was one of the few books that I’ve added to my physical library, coming as it did a year before even Bostrom’s Superintelligence. The author, James Barrat, made one of the earlier cases for the potentially dire path AI would set us on; he got into this food fight long before it looked like a place to attract lots of eyeballs. Last year he published another book called The Intelligence Explosion, and it makes the case even more forcefully. Barrat comes to this from an interesting background as an award-winning documentary filmmaker working with National Geographic, PBS, Discovery Channel, and leading broadcasters across Europe. So we’re going to trace the evolution of the AI peril narrative from the time it was barely registering through to today’s white-hot frenzy. James brings a perspective that’s shaped by his background as a documentary filmmaker that I find very useful for how accessible it makes the macro concerns. It’s a good counterpoint to the often purely technical viewpoints we get here. We talk about regulation scenarios, Steve Omohundro’s rational agent theories, how our fiction shapes AI behavior, mechanistic interpretability, and accelerationism. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.