We’ve been told that Artificial Intelligence is coming for all our jobs, that it will create fake news so real looking there will be no room for doubt, and in the worst case scenarios it will supplant human beings as the dominant lifeform on planet Earth. It’s scary stuff, and yet our fate depends on the same tech bros that have turned social media and the internet into a few concentrated monopolies. Is there still time to rein in A.I.?

In the movies, artificial intelligence is almost always bad, but here in real life, we’ve seen the best and worst of A.I. development. On the one hand, you have Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph Public Health is using A.I. to collate and organize huge data sets, and on the other you have criminals using A.I. videos of real people to rip off victims with elaborate crypto scams involving cryptocurrency, and none of this deals with any of those existential concerns we see in the movies.

But there’s at least one person who’s thinking about that future and he’s from Guelph. Christopher DiCarlo is the author of the new book Building a God: The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and the Race to Control It, which outlines a short history of A.I., the current concerns about its development, the extreme concerns about the people doing the developing, and the ways we still have time to properly regulate A.I, and use it to make the world a better place for all people and not just tech billionaires.

DiCarlo will be taking part in this weekend’s Eden Mills Writers’ Festival to talk about some of those ideas, but he’s going to make one stop before that… this podcast! He will talk about why he’s so concerned about A.I., his long quest to raise the alarm about its development, and the ways we misunderstand the dangers and opportunities of the technology. He will also talk about the difficulties trying to regulate A.I., how we overcome big tech’s resistance to regulation, and if it’s all bad news when it comes to this technology.

So let’s talk about building a God on this week’s Guelph Politicast!

You can buy his book, Building a God: The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and the Race to Control It, wherever you buy fine books, and you can see him discuss his book and the issues around A.I. this Sunday at the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival. You can find information about the festival or buy tickets here. You can also learn more about his advocacy and research into A.I. through Convergence Analysis at their website.

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Photo courtesy of Amazon/MGM.