Episode description

Will AI become conscious? President Biden has just unveiled a new executive order on AI — the U.S. government’s first action of its kind — requiring new safety assessments, equity and civil rights guidance, and research on AI’s impact on the labor market. With this governance in place, can tech companies be counted on to do the right thing for humanity? 

Susan Schneider is a philosopher, artificial intelligence expert, and founding director of the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University. She is author of Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind, Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, and The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness. She held the NASA Chair with NASA and the Distinguished Scholar Chair at the Library of Congress. She is now working on projects related to advancements in AI policy and technology, drawing from neuroscience research and philosophical developments and writing a new book on the shape of intelligent systems.

"I work with Congress and some of the leaders in the intelligence community. There's work that's going on by AI companies, which may benefit humanity or may not, depending upon the AI regulations and the way that history plays out. And it's really hard to tell exactly what will happen. The first concern I have is with surveillance capitalism in this country. The constant surveillance of us because the US is a surveillance capitalist economy, and it's the same elsewhere in the world, right? With Facebook and all these social media companies, things have just been going deeply wrong. And so it leads me to worry about how the future is going to play out. These tech companies aren't going to be doing the right thing for humanity. And this gets to my second worry, which is how's all this going to work for humans exactly? It's not clear where humans will even be needed in the future."

www.fau.edu/artsandletters/philosophy/susan-schneider/index
www.fau.edu/future-mind/

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