Episode 70: Will AI Take Over The World?

Right, come on then.

So will AI take over the world, Tom?

Yeah, good question.

So Matt said to me, maybe a couple of years ago, we should do a podcast about AI.

And I was like, nah, why is that relevant? And do we know anything about it? And so we didn't get around to doing it.

But I've had a couple of conversations recently about AI.

And it's really, I don't know, maybe it's really taken off in the last couple of years.

And it's really started to affect people's everyday lives.

Talking to an engineer friend of mine, Chris, who having not used AI before... sat down to do an afternoon of programming on a, I think it was a boat navigation system software thingamabob that he was working on.

Top level technical explanation there.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Yeah, probably apologies due to Chris there.

But anyway, he sat down to do this programming and he decided he would get AI involved in doing this programming.

And he said to me, it was terrifying.

It did two weeks of his work.

He's a qualified, smart guy.

He had to steer it a bit, but it did two weeks of his work in an afternoon.

And he said to me, I found this really interesting, theological considerations aside, what hope is there for us when these machines can do this stuff so well? I had another couple of conversations recently with friends who are academic, or family members actually, who are academics, just telling me it's becoming completely impossible to discern what is the original work of a student and what is an AI-generated essay or assignment or whatever.

I was chatting to a professor at the university near where I live recently and he was saying he was about to go into a... a disciplinary hearing with a student who had been using AI but I guess that ability to spot even using other machines to identify the machines will become harder and harder and how do you do that? and he was recognising that it's tough AI is getting I can remember the conversation two years ago sitting in a pub in Cirencester I don't spend all my time in pubs just as a footnote but I did with a friend of mine who I play cricket with who's a software engineer he's in this world and he got chat GPT out on his phone and said Matt look at this this is great try it out and he typed in write a poem about Matt Frost and And it did.

But I reckon if I did that now, it would be so much better.

Even those last couple of years, it has exploded into our workplaces, exploded into our day-to-day lives, exploded into just our ordinary usage of things.

It's exploded into our images, our videos.

It has moved so rapidly in the last two years.