Last week's conversation with Allison Pugh painted a rather terrifying portrait of the age of Artificial Intelligence and its continued gutting of the human workforce, from grocery store clerks to medical assistants to novelists. This week, we'll continue the AI conversation with a more optimistic take. My guests, Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna, co-authors of "The AI Con" and hosts of the "Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000" podcast, posit that machine learning isn't all that it's cracked up to be. In fact, these programs are riddled with problems, inaccuracies, inefficiencies, and really only amount to predictive text on steroids.
The very name "Artificial Intelligence" is, in fact, a misnomer assigned by Silicon Valley PR representatives to convince us that AI is actually sentient when in reality all it does is regurgitate human-programmed information, and the majority of the time gets it wrong. Why don't we hear about these failures? Why don't we hear about the inaccuracies and inefficiencies? In a word: hype.
The best news yet, Emily and Alex are convinced that the AI bubble is on the verge of bursting! Whoohoo! God, I hope they're right. I don't want to live in some technological dystopia.
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