Nien-hê Hsieh on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

If you step back from your research, from your teaching, what excites you right now, the moment we're in, uh, between humans and AI?

So the first thing is maybe we are finally at the moment where the things that are routine, mm, boring, dangerous about work can be eliminated and done by machines.

Uh, because if you think about it, every, uh, generation of technological progress has promised that we will be freed from drudgery, for example, right? You can go back to Oscar Wilde back in the 1850s.

He was talking about how machines would liberate us from sort of drudgery and allow us to pursue the arts and do the kinds of things that we really wanted to do.

But if you think about it, that really hasn't come to pass.

Uh, if you think about, um, kitchen appliances, uh, laundry machines, right? Those are supposed to take away some of the drudgery and time that people spent doing those tasks, but apparently people still spend the same amount of time doing a lot of household work.

So maybe [laughs] we're at a moment where this technological development will allow people to be freed up to do the kinds of things that they would wanna do in their creative time.

So that's sort of one thing that could be good.

Um, I think something else that's interesting is, uh, that artificial intelligence may allow us to do things a lot better.

Uh, so what I mean by that are things like drug discovery, um, is one area where there's a lot of promise, for example.

Um, and, and so that's another thing that's sort of exciting.

Uh, another thing that I think is exciting is that AI can do things differently from how we do things.

So here I have in mind an example from a number of years ago, which is AlphaGo.

So I don't know if you're familiar with AlphaGo or not.

I'm not, no.

Okay.

So AlphaGo is a program that was designed to play Go, the game Go.

Okay.

And many people thought that the game Go, because of the number of m- possibilities on the, um-

Hello, it's Chris.