Episode 198: Blessing or curse? Dawn grills Ken on listeners’ toughest AI questions in this all-AI AMA

Today we have an Ask Me Anything episode that focuses on artificial intelligence. For the past year, AI has dominated the headlines. Perhaps because there’s so much media and public interest, as well as paranoia, about AI, listeners have been flooding our mailbox with AI-related questions.

So, today’s AMA is an exclusive focused on artificial intelligence. For our listeners who have been sending questions about ketamine; NASA’s Artemis mission to the Moon; or whether high meat consumption leads to dementia; fear not, because we will follow up today’s episode in a few weeks with a second round of AMA.

Dr. Ken Ford will be answering today’s AI questions. He has been working in AI since the 1980s and is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. As a result, he is well-positioned to help us today to separate real advances in AI from hype, panic and science fiction.

If you have questions for Ken and Dawn after listening to today’s episode, or any episode of STEM-Talk, email your questions to STEM-Talk producer Randy Hammer at rhammer.ihmc.org.

Show notes:

[00:03:15] Dawn opens our AMA episode on AI with a listener question for Ken on whether AI companies should be protected under section 230 of the U.S. Communications Decency Act.

[00:08:03] Following up on the previous question, a listener asks if Ken foresees a day where laws and courts will designate AI as a judicial person, in the same way that corporations have rights under the legal doctrine of corporate personhood.

[00:10:55] A listener asks Ken for his thoughts on a recent article published in the Atlantic titled “The Data-Center Panic is Overblown: Critics are Inflating the Costs.”

[00:16:09] A listener asks Ken a question regarding episode 171 of STEM-Talk, in which Ken discussed a June 2024 report by Leopold Aschenbrenner which predicted rates of growth in both compute resources and power requirements for AI data centers. The listener asks how well these predictions have held up in the following year.

[00:22:19] Another listener question about data centers asks Ken what his thoughts are on the notion of solving the electricity costs and cooling requirements for data centers by building them in orbit and powering them via solar energy.

[00:30:07] Moving on to the applications of AI, Peter Attia recently wrote about a study out of Harvard that suggests that today’s large language models perform extremely well on medical licensing exams and often arrive at the correct diagnosis yet still struggle with differential diagnosis. The listener asks what this means about the use of AI in medicine.

[00:36:53] A listener asks Ken about repeated public statements by Anthropic’s CEO that their AI models, and those expected in the future, are already powerful and dangerous enough to justify concern, while at the same time Anthropic and other leading AI companies are continuing to employ these systems and cautioning governments against regulation that could slow down innovation. The listener asks Ken how to resolve this contradiction.