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Madhumita Murgia

lines on the record: 39
first: 2024-03-22
most recent: 2024-03-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Most inspiring takeaway of this whole thing that there are automated systems that are curtailing our individual agency and kind of increasing opacity of how things operate in the world around us, but we can have a voice in it and that's what we should be doing over the next few years, finding our voices.”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Trap them in this dragnet. And she is genuinely risking her life to expose how this ecosystem works to kind of decode this. And, you know, for her, it's the work that she feels compelled to do, which, you know, and we talked, you know, we met quite a few times and talked about, does she feel she's actually making a difference against this huge, powerful institution, which is the CCP and is it worth it? And, you know, she said, you know, she does question this herself on many days, but for her, she feels that like it feels like it's just her, but it never has been. Whenever you have oppression and surveillance and curtailment of human rights, you might think you're on your own, but there's actually, you know, a whole boatload of people rowing in the same direction. And so that for me was kind of the most.”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where you have a high concentration of Uyghur Muslims and it's been reported widely now around the world that there are these education or re-education camps, as the Chinese government calls them, where many Uyghur Muslims who are trapped in a sort of drag net of surveillance are put into to sort of teach them to be Chinese, to teach them the language. Many cases, you know, people in these camps have disappeared. And they've been called out as huge human rights issue. And Maya was able to find the app that was being used by the police in Xinjiang stage, found it, you know, by trawling the internet. And essentially decoding what exactly they were surveilling, you know, what are the various variables that they're tracking about all of these families in many cases they haven't done anything they're just talking to relatives in other countries and so on and finding a way to kind of”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, I'm glad you say that. So I actually wanted it. So the final three chapters are actually around this theme of resistance in small and big ways. Gig workers and how they fight back by kind of these little tricks that help them to kind of compete against the algorithm and twist it so that they can kind of get the best jobs, which are like wonderful and inspiring. But kind of on the highest level, I spent time with Maya Wang, who is a Chinese activist. She works for Human Rights Watch, but she's had to leave Hong Kong where she was based and is now in the US. And she was one of the, or she was the woman who uncovered the data system, the algorithmic system that underpinned the policing in the Xinjiang state in China. So, you know, Shenzhang region in China.”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They work in those areas and they are now powering much of the infrastructure for the NHS's kind of data. So we are seeing through channels of procurement, tech companies come in. But I do think that the work of the next few years is figuring out how can governments benefit from that expertise and help citizens while also protecting this, as you say, very valuable data that in a way that can actually, that we can all see some benefit in them. I'm not fully, I don't feel hopeless about this. Yes, we will have these five big tech companies, cloud companies involved in many ways because they're forming the infrastructure and backbone of AI now or of the internet. But I think there are ways to kind of keep our data safe. And that will be the work that governments will have to do. Moving forward”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think that it is going to be very difficult for any company or government like independently, at least in the West. I think China is different. They hold huge amount of data that is crossed up and connected both on local and global levels. And they also, you know, they can build their own technology, state-owned technology as well. But if we are going to procure AI systems in Western governments, of course, you're going to have to find somebody to do that for you. And we've seen that with the NHS, there have been many attempts over the years to kind of use that data in a way that can help people. At the moment, Palantir has won a big contract here in the UK. This is the American data company that works a lot for defense departments around the world, was initially funded by a CIA grant.”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People inside profit making institutions. And then we come to regulation. So yes, I do think that we're seeing the companies really kind of almost quasi-states at this point. Many of them have more data, money and power than many states do.”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think big tech is becoming increasingly sort of playing the role of what we would usually look to the state for. And I mentioned before about them having all of the knowledge and resources required to build future AI systems as well, which also puts them in a position just in terms of the knowledge that they have where governments are going to be reliant on them to provide this stuff. I wrote years ago now in 2019 about how increasingly we were seeing less academics, independent academics at universities working on AI problems, particularly, I don't mean AI ethics problems or social impact of AI. I mean actual AI development, you know, academics who are funded to build these systems and understand how they work and try and break them. And now.”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Similarly, you have AWS and Azure and Google as well in India providing much of the healthcare infrastructure. Again, I spoke to, you know, social, not just activists, but kind of researchers looking at the relationships between companies and governments who said it's so deeply embedded that we don't think our governments could provide much of the services they're doing without these companies anymore. And I think we've all become increasingly aware of how reliant we are even personally on these systems for interpersonal communication, for the work that we do in our relationship with our state. And this was why the stories reflect that increasing scale. And yes, this is about power.”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. And I think for me, the structure of the book was also done to reflect this, where they're a specter that comes in across the book. They kind of appear in these unexpected places, right? What's Microsoft doing that? What are they up to in Salter or, you know, didn't realize Uber was doing this or whatever, you know? So I think that that was the point to say we might not realize it, but they're getting closer and closer to providing the basic infrastructure to government. So I spoke to a Mexican data activist, Paola Ricarte. She's kind of, she's a political scientist activist. And she was talking about how during COVID, you know, the Mexican government was reliant on Google for their own data collection of what was happening in the country during the pandemic. Because, you know, the infrastructure was provided by the company and they couldn't kind of develop anything without them.”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lawyers, or whatever it is in any area of human expertise, we need to kind of, you know, those up that we need to preserve that alongside these systems and allow them to kind of enhance what you do and bring that to more people rather than thinking of it as a way to just kind of cut costs or replace. And yeah, I think healthcare is a way for us to understand why humans matter.”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who's the doctor that I write about said, which I think is really kind of applicable beyond, is she never saw this in any way as a threat to her or a replacement for her because, you know, she knows her value as a doctor in this community and what she can do. But she saw it as one of the many tools in her toolkit, you know, alongside x-rays or CT scans or whatever else. You know, this was another great tool to help kind of give her confidence or to give less experienced doctors more confidence in the news they were delivering and to kind of increase access to care. And I think that's how anyone implementing these systems should see it as, you know, we can never replace the expertise of humans that we've built up, whether that's social workers who kind of understand the communities they've been embedded in or, you know, criminal justice defense.”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, I think that you're right. There is the expectation of patient privacy and the protection of data and things in healthcare, which could be really good lessons. But also it's the human side of it, right? We all understand instinctively why we value human doctors. Of course, it's because they can diagnose us and tell us how to get better, but it's also, you know, having a person who can break news to you that's really difficult or helping you cope with something that, you know, even positive health news like pregnancy. I remember like having a really weird interaction with a GP when I first found out I was pregnant. It was a lovely, happy thing, but the sort of delivery and the interaction left me feeling really cold. So I think we all inherently understand why we value humans in the medical process. And I think one of the things that Ashita Singh”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had to live within our healthcare system, can see how it's creaking at the edges. I think this can, it's more than a band-aid. I think it can really kind of change how we receive care. So for me, that's a huge opportunity.”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's kind of really exciting. And healthcare in particular, I write about in my book specifically the story of a doctor in India, an Indian doctor who works in a very rural part of Western India just on the border a few hours from Mumbai. And she mostly works with local tribal populations and she's helping to train an AI system that can help diagnose tuberculosis. For me, this was just fascinating because, you know, it's a really kind of widespread illness, but it's a treatable and a curable one. Yet people are dying from it because of lack of access. So there it just feels really kind of a no-brainer, right? If you can train an AI system that can go out into the kind of inner country in mobile vans without doctors to screen people, you know, the”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think for me the spots of optimism are scientific innovation and healthcare to areas where it just, you know, this technology is ripe for innovation in. I think I haven't written very much in this book about scientific innovation, but in a former life was studying to be an immunologist. And so I'm really interested in the kind of crossover between health, technology, kind of pushing forward the frontiers of science. And there are some really amazing examples we've seen with Alphafold, for example, that has come out of Google's AI ARM DeepMind, which is based in London, a system that can predict the structure of proteins, which you can, any protein in the world, which helps then to kind of develop new materials, whether that's in pharmaceuticals or energy and so on, which I thought.”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Their algorithms to maybe less than half a dozen AI companies that have the data, the infrastructure, and the know-how to build these technologies. They're the only people who really know how to test what's inside them and really to kind of who control how they'll be implemented. And so I think I definitely saw that sort of widening inequity. Often I felt that the harms were seen primarily felt by not just like socioeconomically disadvantaged people, but in the case of, say, gig workers, it was often migrants who come to a new country and who didn't have really any option but to work as, say, an Ubert driver or a delivery, you know, food delivery courier. So it was often these people who are being harmed by AI systems.”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think that was definitely an overall thread to the story, which was that, you know, when AI is developed, implemented, regulated, it's meant to be for the benefit of many, but often the people who see the benefits are those who are already advantaged or in a position of majority or kind of privilege in society. And often the harms that we talk about with AI bias or the harms of using deepfakes against women on the internet, this is all experienced by minorities or kind of disadvantaged communities already. So the inequities are just widening is what I was seeing over and over again. And while this happens, the entrenchment of power continues to scale up and increase, right? We've gone from social media companies having all of the data and kind of concentrating power in that way through.”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, she kind of compared it to factory workers making Gucci shoes. You know, they might be in Bangladesh or the Philippines who have no idea that what they're being paid. So that was, you know, like a bright spot for me. But I think I concluded that it's not enough to just give someone a job. It's not charity. They're working in exchange for money. We still need to push for making sure that they benefit from the AI kind of explosion that will come in business and industry. And currently, their wages are hugely depressed when you look at how much money tech companies are making out the other end. So yeah, I think that's a problem to be solved”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so I think if you report on this from a kind of news perspective, of course there's the question of are they being paid enough. And they're doing the same work, digital work that someone would do in the US or the UK. So why should they be paid any differently, right? And then, of course, there's the people running these companies say, oh, it would distort the local labor markets. You can't pay them too much because if they're living in the slums of Kibera in Nairobi, you can't suddenly be paying them more than everybody else. It would change all the local pricing, etc. I'm not sure that was true. You know, I think that there does need to be a complete sort of redefining of like what do data laborers get paid because they are part of a pipeline of technology, which is worth billions, if not trillions of dollars coming out the other end. And one of the lawyers I spoke to in Kenya who's fighting on behalf of some of these workers”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Them, right? But then also to figure out, you know, what does this labor market look like and to try and, you know, I'm not an economist. So for me, again, it was from a journalistic viewpoint of like, how is this changing people's lives? Is it for the better or worse? Or what are the gray areas in between, right? And so I went to Bulgaria. I went to Nairobi and to Buenos Aires to look at three very different markets again to see kind of what was the real impact on the lives of the low income populations that had been recruited into this. And I think for me, the results were mixed and unexpected.”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is sitting and labelling because without that AI systems just don't recognize what they are. You know, images need to be labeled, videos need to be analyzed. And there's somebody who has to do them and you need, you know, this has to be done at a huge scale. So you need cheap labor ultimately to do it. And so people have turned to the developing world where, you know, you can pay a living wage, but that living wage is much more affordable than doing it in the West. And people want digital jobs because the jobs, the alternatives that they have are things like manual labor, cleaning, domestic work, construction work, and so on. For me, you know, I wanted to firstly show, you know, what is the work and who are the people that are doing the work of building the bedrock of AI systems before we even get to training the systems and deploying?”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. I think that we're all maybe theoretically or intellectually aware that AI systems are built on data. I think we know that. You need huge amounts of data, but that makes it feel very clinical and detached. What is the data? Well, it's behavior, it's human creativity. If words are training chat GPT, that's probably words that you and I may have written or spoken. So this isn't data isn't disconnected from the reality of like what who we are and what we make. And in many of these cases, this is, you know, driving data or voice data for Alexa or images for Instagram and so on. Many of these data labels were labeling snippets of text for chat GPT as well. So this is all content generated by us and that some”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That it was helpful ultimately to be kind of assisted by this councillor from the city to kind of get her family back on track. And she kind of now is of the opinion that it's not all bad. But it's really about how you frame these things. Is it a target on your back? Have you done something bad that you meant to be punished for? Or is this genuinely meant to be like a restorative justice thing in which case, you know, you need to include these voices in that you're using AI systems on?”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Discussion, right? She didn't know why her children were on the list. She felt like it was she was being told it was her fault, that she had this whole host of lawyers and like other sort of public workers coming in and kind of making her feel like she was an up to scratch at her job as a mother and really cut her out of the whole decision making. And if you're trying to kind of strengthen children's futures, how can you cut their mothers out? And so I think so much of this is we need to figure out if we're going to deploy it in via government, how do you include the people that it's predicting things about so that they feel that they have a voice and some agency? And actually with Diana, the mother in Amsterdam, you know, when she eventually kind of wrote to the mayor and she got a new, you know, they provided a counselor for her who kind of worked with her rather than against her. She actually found”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that, yes, so philosophically, I think if you know that you have a sweeping social issue, we should be looking at it from sort of multiple perspectives, you know, whether that's social workers, governments, educators all coming together to figure out how to fix something rather than just bringing in data scientists, you know, to target individual families. But I think the other issue is also maybe statistical systems can help under-resourced, say, you know, local councils or other public institutions to figure out how to deploy resources. I can see why that could be attractive. But it's so important to kind of figure out how you include the actual communities there. So in both cases, the biggest issue for the people I spoke to, so in the case of Amsterdam, you know, I spent time speaking with one of the mothers of two boys who were on this list. Her issue was being completely excluded from”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And she was not even an activist. She was literally an older woman who has been living as part of the barrier community for many years who felt a personal responsibility to kind of look out for her community. And she walked with me through this neighborhood with one of the”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That nothing happened for these people. Their lives were not improved in any way. The algorithm was sort of suspended when he left government. Nobody did anything with all the data that was collected. And really the only people who seemed to benefit were Pablo, the bureaucrat, who's now gone on to be a startup founder selling this idea to other Latin American and African governments as a way to sort of improve socioeconomic conditions and possibly Microsoft that it gave them a bit of a taste of working with public authorities and kind of some experience in that area. So really the people it was meant to benefit never saw any benefits from it along with the kind of very problematic issues of trying to profile girls who are trying to get pregnant. So I think, you know, again, lots of unintended and social consequences there that could have been much better anticipated, I think.”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Girls to be educated. But having kind of painted a picture for you about the sort of small town, highly Catholic, the socioeconomic divide between Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations in Salter, you can see why this could play out to, you know, be really negative in terms of the consequences. And what are you going to do? Turn up to a family and say your 14-year-old is going to be pregnant? Like, how are they going to cope with that? So I traveled up there. I met with this former bureaucrat to really understand what his motivations were. How did he expect to roll something like this out? How did he speak to the families? And what I found there was it wasn't, you know, the sort of dystopian dark outcome that you might expect. He wasn't going around telling people they were going to get pregnant. It was more something much more sort of maybe banal, but equally disappointing, I think, which is.”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had been trying to address. Often it was found in the barriers amongst socially socioeconomically disadvantaged populations who tended to be from the local indigenous populations rather than the kind of European immigrants. And so there was a lot of kind of ethnic and sociocultural issues associated with these teenage pregnancies also. Also remember at the time until 2020 abortions were illegal in Argentina. It's a very Catholic community as well. So all of this played into the fact that he felt an algorithm to predict these pregnancies would be the best way to tackle them because then they could, similar to Amsterdam, target resources, public resources towards these families and help them to prevent what he saw as this negative outcome and help these families to get jobs or help these”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that was so, in some ways related, right? But in such a completely different part of the world. So the system that algorithm at the heart of that story was one that was attempting to predict teenage pregnancies amongst families. And this was in Salta, which is a small town in the north of Argentina, you know, near the borders of Bolivia. And the system was kind of developed in conjunction with Microsoft by a local bureaucrat who had worked as a data scientist. And he really felt there was a problem there. There was rising teenage pregnancies. In many cases, these girls ended up having to start working at a young age to support their families in this kind of cycle of poverty perpetuated. This is a social issue that existed that social workers and other”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do more of it, you know, which is if you've ever been a teenager, it kind of feels like the obvious outcome of that. And also in some cases, they became targets for drug gangs and things like that because they knew that these boys had kind of could get into trouble anyway. And the police were watching them and they sort of used that to kind of force them into committing crimes that they maybe otherwise wouldn't have. So I think often, you know, trying to prophesy something through a predictive system makes you feel like you have a fixed path. And for something that's so changeable as human behavior, especially like as a child or a young person, you know, we all know how much you can change from between 16 to 26. It did feel like, you know, very punitive for these children. So that's kind of one of the unintended consequences, I think, of using AI.”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly that. Yeah. So, you know, they were coming up with these lists and these were lists of mostly boys, majority Moroccan immigrants in Amsterdam. So, you know, in some ways, a very sort of specific type of list of young people. And while, as I said, they were supposed to support these families, many of which were single-parent family, single mother families. Really, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy, essentially, where children who maybe were in a little bit of trouble, there was some truancy, maybe had committed some sort of low impact, as they call them crimes, started to feel like this was their destiny and they were constantly being pulled up by police. They were recognized in public by police who would kind of call out their names. And all of this fed into them feeling like they'd already done something bad. And so they might as well.”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It ends up having really harmful results. So, you know, you mentioned Amsterdam. That for me was a really perfect example of a city that was hoping to do good. They introduced an AI system to predict future criminals amongst children, you know, which sounds dystopian. But their goal was to find families that needed help.”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, that's the heart of the whole book, I think, which is that you can code something on a computer and expect it to behave in a certain way, but partly because of the nature of AI itself, which is that it's a predictive engine. It's not just pure Q&A, black and white. There are so many gray areas in terms of how they kind of output, whether that's images and words with generative AI or decisions with sort of more statistical AI systems. It's messy. It's not black and white. And in particular, as you say, when it's kind of introduced into a human context where traditionally humans have been in charge or are the experts, you find that, you know, actually unexpected things happen, even people with good intentions, you know, who implement these systems.”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and the reason for that is I feel like often, you know, if you read what's out there about AI, you could be forgiven for thinking this is all just happening either in California or in sort of very developed Western nations. And for me, trying to talk about the impact on people, I felt like I needed to talk about where they were living, what that looked like, and how their communities and the culture plays into how AI is implemented. And I think you can talk a lot about, you know, theoretically about impacts of AI on people or ethical issues around AI, but nothing brings it to life better than going and meeting somebody and kind of talking to a community about what did this mean for you? How did it change your life? And also to go to places that you wouldn't expect AI to be in. Wanted to kind of bring that home through my writing”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And look at where it's reached. You know, the far flung corners unexpectedly like Argentina or Kenya or rural India, where people are using these systems or are being subjected to these systems. So I wanted to go and find these stories and kind of tell it in a very human way. Also for audiences who didn't know that they cared about technology or who maybe thought that they don't. But to kind of be like, well, this is a part of everyone's life now. So that was the motivating kind of. You know, the impulse that I started out with.”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Companies are using this to prize what your premiums should be for car insurance. So the whole story changed as the technology evolved. And for me, I found that what I was writing and what I was reading about AI around the world, it often was kind of so focused on the magic of the technology itself or how it worked or what it could do because of the sort of sci-fi aura around it that we were noticing how it was transforming our everyday lives in kind of often hidden ways. So when I set out to write it, I wanted to do something that no one else was doing, which was looking at just the lives of ordinary people, not the demigods that we put on pedestals who are building these systems, who are fascinating, of course, you know, the innovators and the entrepreneurs, but really to move out of the bubble of silicon.”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I've spent over a decade at this point writing about AI, which feels mad because I think my entire working career has been 11 years. But basically from very early on at Wired, I was fascinated by these technologies. And back then it was very much sort of sci-fi-ish, you know, the future of technology kind of stories on brain machine interfaces and so on. But over the years, it's evolved into something that's kind of embedded so much into our daily lives. And because I've been writing about it over that period, I kind of felt like the stories I was writing were evolving too and were going from kind of, oh, look at this amazing, crazy fringe thing to the DWP is using AI technologies to decide who should get benefits, which is feels like such a mundane application, right? Or insurance.”
2024-03-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Long Shadow of AI, with Madhumita Murgia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT