Russ Roberts: uncertainty

Transcript context

…There’s a page. We mentioned it when we agreed to do this. It’s page 217, on artificial intelligence. What did you make of that? [laughs] Oh, I loved it. I don’t agree with every word of it. I don’t know if prescient is the right word, but it was eerie. It was one of the two most intellectually interesting things in the book for me, as opposed to literary, emotional power. We’ll come back to the second in a second. You want to read that passage? It’s a great passage. It’s a whole chapter. It’s only a couple of paragraphs. I’ll read part of it. “An electronic machine may carry out mathematical calculations, remember historical facts, play chess, and translate books from one language to another. It is able to solve mathematical problems more quickly than man, and its memory is faultless. Is there any limit to progress, to its ability to create machines in the image and likeness of man? It seems that the answer is no.” There’s more, but that’s just the opening part. There was, of course, throughout the 1960s, a Soviet obsession with artificial intelligence. We often forget in the West, but they, as a regime, were convinced it was going to be the future. It pops up a great deal in Soviet science fiction. There’s that book about the science city in Siberia that was created by the Soviets. There’s a whole chapter in that book about what they were trying to do with AI. It was one of their top priorities. Obviously, they didn’t get very far, but Grossman is showing he was swept up in that mania. I think what he says on this page is true, except for the memory being faultless. We know that’s not true. There are still hallucinations.…

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