WTH is Going On with Artificial Intelligence? Tyler Cowen Explains the Next Technological Revolution

The wheel, the printing press, the steam engine, and… ChatGPT? A
Luddite you may be, but there is no escaping the world’s newest
technological revolution: personal artificial intelligence. It is
easy to list the net-negatives of another tech medium designed to
further decrease the already dwindling human-to-human
interactions in our life – the atomization of society is bad,
children growing up on screens is bad, the erosion of individual
judgment and critical thinking is bad. Not to mention the
evanescence of jobs and the mechanization of learning. But is it
all bad? Like any technological advance, there are both
beneficial and dangerous applications. And as our guest notes,
the danger of misuse does not reside in 1’s and 0’s, but in the
user, the human. Are the forces of good more productive and
innovative than evil? Or will we fall prey to our own innovation?


These questions and more with Tyler Cowen. Dr. Cowen is a
professor at George Mason University, where he holds the Holbert
L. Harris chair in the economics department. He hosts the
economics blog Marginal Revolution, and maintains the website
Marginal Revolution University, a venture in online education. He
is the co-author of Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Winners,
and Creatives Around the World.


Download the transcript here.