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Stephen Fry – AI: A Means to an End or a Means to Our End?
The text of a talk I gave on Thursday 12th September as the inaugural “Living Well With Technology” lecture for King’s College London’s Digital Futures Institute.
Elsewhere — Brexit, Trump, TikTok, COVID, the rise of nationalist populism and populist nationalism, state sanctioned and criminal cyber terrorism, epidemics of anxiety, depression and self-harm amongst our children and young adults, and a cloud of disappointment, pessimism, mistrust and despair over us all. Brilliant as the contributions of more recent workers in the field has been, people like Geoffrey Hinton, Stuart Russell, then Andrew Ng, Yann LeCun, Demis Hassabis and Fei-Fei Li, they have all enjoyed a huge and decisive advantage over Turing and Minsky and the early crowd. For sure, the kind of Large Language Models we are playing around with at the moment as standalone chat engines, we can deride them as non-sentient probabilistic mimics, “stochastic parrots” in computational linguist Emily Bender’s great phrase, but their vocabularies, syntactical and grammatical competences and levels of functional comprehension are above the human average and for a vast variety of jobs they will more than do.
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