The only thing inside an AI is people

In a new StarTalk episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-host Negin Farsad interviewed Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist who wrote the 2023 New Yorker piece, "There Is No AI."

Lanier thinks calling AI a "black box" where nobody knows what's inside these models is really just a way to avoid the truth: the box is full of people and their data. If AI is an alien intelligence, he says, then people are obsolete and will be forced to live on handouts from whoever controls the system. But if AI is people, then people will be paid to keep making genuinely new things, and there's no end to that.

Side note: he thinks the cure for a teenager who thinks they have an AI girlfriend is to show them a group photo of the engineers who built it.

Previously:
• Jaron Lanier's crazy idea for signaling/searching for ETs
• "I'm allowed to do this": how attackers talk past AI safeguards