Getting to Know AI: Are We Asking the Wrong Questions?
A.I. has emerged as a force in culture today with the power to do immense good and immense harm. Journalists and other commentators have focused on the technological glitz of these new mechanisms and foregrounded the perspectives of their creators and their cheerleaders. In this episode we ask a different set of questions about how A.I. is already at work in our everyday life and what responsible deliberation about the potentials of these tools would look like. While engineers and entrepreneurs have often been driven to achieve greater speed and efficiency, our humanities focus asks about the implications of A.I. and what offloading tasks once done by human beings might mean for virtue, ethics and the good life.
Matt Jordan, a Penn State associate professor of media studies and executive producer of “HumIn Focus,” said, “For years, technology journalists have breathlessly promoted each new advancement from Silicon Valley, helping the tech industry raise capital while moving fast and breaking things. We think this time should be different. Society should include more than just engineers in a conversation about tools with enormous potential for good and bad. In this episode, we want to raise different questions that might help slow down the speed at which this emergent technology is adopted and give us time to talk about it before it causes irreparable harm.”
Read the press release for this episode in the Penn State News.
Find this episode in the WPSU June 2023 guide.