Fear of AI

Geertjan Wielenga: The other aspect of this is that in the '50s and '60s, there were many books and movies about how robots would take over our lives. Robots were understood to be large, clunky devices or externalized aliens. Now, we have washing machines, refrigerators, and comparable devices, which are all actually robots. Robots have taken over our lives, but in a good way. Do you think the fear comes from worrying about a loss of control?

Laurence Moroney: Yes, but also people generally are afraid of things that they don't know. Much of the job of an advocate is helping people to know. You need to be able to communicate to people that there's not a button that you press and suddenly there's a living creature in there. AI is just the new paradigm for programming that kind of emulates the way humans do things.

I often joke that sometimes, the way we name the tech kind of oversells it. We talk about something being a neural network, which...