Episode notes
Whose imagination do you want to live in? In this new series, bestselling biographer Walter Isaacson sits down with the most consequential names in AI and tech to understand the futures they're racing to build. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Fei-Fei Li, Dario and Daniela Amodei, and more open up about their ambitions, what frightens them, how they think about humanity, and what drives them to build so big and so fast. The conversations are intimate, charming, and sometimes chilling. But mostly, they're impossible to dismiss. Because whether or not you agree with them, it's their…
Transcript
Read the transcript · about 380 words, follows along as you listen
Speaker 1:How do you know when you're dealing with Claude that it won't become manipulative? Do you see any problem having drones that'll make kill decisions without a human being.
Speaker 2:In the loop?
Speaker 1:If artificial intelligence can do so much and take over so much of what we do, what's left for humans to do, how do we find meaning?
Speaker 2:I'm Walter Isaacson, host of the new podcast, The Builders. There's no question we're living through an AI arms race. But I wanted to understand, what are we racing towards? So I went directly to the people shaping our future to understand what they believe, what they fear, and where they think all of this is heading. People like Elon Musk.
Speaker 3:If there's a million times more digital intelligence than there is biological intelligence, it's hard to imagine humans being in control in that scenario.
Speaker 2:Dario and Daniela Amadei.
Speaker 4:Six months from now, the things that seemed hard, they're going to be easy. Twelve months from now, the things that seemed impossible, the models are going to be doing them regularly.
Speaker 2:Palmer Luckey.
Speaker 4:You don't want to live in a world where a handful of corporate weapons executives get to have control over U.S.
Speaker 3:Foreign policy.
Speaker 1:Shouldn't the democratically elected leaders make that decision rather than heads of technology corporations?
Speaker 2:Alex Karp, Fei-Fei Li, Gary Tan, and more. I wanted to understand what they're building towards and what future we will all inherit.
Speaker 5:How do we create the future we want? Silicon Valley is always saying the cliche thing about the way to predict the future is to create it. Well, yeah, it's up to us.
Speaker 1:But when you say us, who's us? Is it 400 people that you know in Silicon Valley? Is it me down here in New Orleans? What are we supposed to do?
Speaker 2:These builders are brilliant.
Speaker 1:Brand.
Speaker 2:Controversial. Their decisions are already shaping our world.
Speaker 5:And now we live on their timeline, where the age of intelligence is much closer.
Speaker 2:The question is, whose imagination do we want to live in?
Speaker 4:My God, you just scale this thing up another factor of a million, and it'll be better than humans at everything.
Speaker 2:Listen to The Builders on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Transcript supplied by the publisher with the episode.
Podcast
The Builders
iHeartPodcasts and Kaleidoscope · Society & Culture · English
Whose imagination do you want to live in? In this new series, bestselling biographer Walter Isaacson sits down with the most consequential names in AI and tech to understand the futures they're racing to build. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Fei-Fei Li, Dario and Daniela Amodei, and more open up
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