Kelly has a fascinating conversation with University of Toronto professor Christopher DiCarlo where they discuss his new book: “Building a God: The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and the Race to Control It.”  

This book is a warning about where we let AI go if we’re not more careful. Why? 

“Once it becomes super powerful with this AGI capability and we decide we’re just going to let it feed back onto itself and become more and more and more powerful, we have no idea what’s going to happen at that point. And if it develops into the final type of AI, which is ASI or artificial super intelligence, that’s when it becomes godlike and we have no idea whether we’ll be able to control or contain or stop this thing.” 

You write about the fact that there is a way for us to protect ourselves from this technology. 

“If we all cooperate with AI and we’re all transparent and we’re all fair in our dealings with AI, everybody does better. It’s a prisoner’s dilemma. It’s part of game theory. Everybody does better. If you get one dissenter, one country, one company, one individual saying, I want more for myself. This isn’t enough. I want more. That single defector could ruin it for the rest of us. It is a time in our existence where ethically we’re going to have to grow up super-fast and get it through our skulls that cooperation is the key to our survival.” 

Why isn’t the government doing more about this? 

“When I give public lectures on this topic, without question, the two most common questions I get are, ‘Why are we just finding out about this now?’ And, ‘Why isn’t the government doing more about it?’ And it’s like, well, that’s my job is to try to let the public know so that they can let the politicians know and so we can vote for the types of governance we all want that’s going to give us the very best that AI has to offer while mitigating the very worst that could possibly happen.”