Beware the AI Prophets: Hype, Doom, and Prediction as Tools of Control w/ Carissa Véliz

When a tech executive says AI will be doing your job next year, it sounds like a forecast. Dr. Carissa Véliz argues it's something else: a command, delivered in advance, that works only if enough of us obey it. If you believe the prediction, you buy the product, reorganize your company, and bet the economy on it, and the prediction comes true because you made it so. So who gets to make predictions that stick? And what would it take to stop treating them as news and start hearing them as orders?

More like this: AGI is Scientifically Impossible w/ Adam Becker

In this episode, Alix Dunn talks with Carissa Véliz, associate professor at Oxford's Institute for Ethics in AI and author of Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, From Ancient Oracles to AI. Carissa explains why a prediction is a command disguised as a description, how powerful people use algorithms to fulfill their own forecasts, and why the alternative just might be being relying on preparation over prediction.

Further reading & resources:

Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, From Ancient Oracles to AI — Carissa Véliz

Beware the Power of Prediction — Carissa Véliz, TED Talk

The Origins of Totalitarianism — Hannah Arendt
The Dangerous Ideas of “Longtermism” and “Existential Risk” — Émile P. Torres, Current Affairs

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Computer Says Maybe is produced by Kushal Dev, Marion Wellington, Van Newman, and Zoe Trout

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