The God We Made: the threat and promise of artificial intelligence

Episode Description

What would it take to keep hold of what makes us human, when the machines around us are doing so much of what only humans could once do?

All That We Touch returns with a conversation recorded live at Gleebooks, where pianist, educator and writer Anna Goldsworthy joins Princeton scholar Sophie Gee discuss some of the ideas explored in Goldsworthy’s new Quarterly Essay, The God We Made: the threat and promise of artificial intelligence.

Goldsworthy and Gee talk through why friction and difficulty might be essential to human meaning rather than problems to engineer away, what it means that some people are forming relationships with AI companions built to please rather than push back, and what could really be at stake if the current trajectory carries us toward artificial general intelligence and beyond.

The conversation ranges over the bias embedded in models trained on centuries of scraped human writing, the invisible labour and environmental cost the technology depends on, and the inequality it risks deepening both within societies and between them. An audience Q&A pushes further still, ranging from machine consciousness to the lessons of computer chess, and closing on a question that lingers well past the room: what can the humanities still offer a field being shaped mostly by engineers and capital?

Voices

Anna Goldsworthy is a concert pianist, chamber musician and author of several books, including the novel Melting Moments, the memoirs Piano Lessons and Welcome to Your New Life, and the 2013 Quarterly Essay Unfinished Business. She is Dean of the Elder Conservatorium of Music at the University of Adelaide and incoming Artistic Director of the Australian National Academy of Music. Her most recent Quarterly Essay is The God We Made: the threat and promise of artificial intelligence.

Sophie Gee is Professor of English at Princeton University and Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Sydney. She is the author of scholarly monographs and an historical novel, co-host of the Secret Life of Books podcast, and her latest book, The Barbarous Feast: Eating and Writing in the Eighteenth-Century World, is published by Princeton University Press.

Credits

This episode of All That We Touch was recorded live on Gadigal Land, at Sydney’s Gleebooks. For more literary events like this one, see the Gleebooks events page.

The episode was edited and mixed by Daniel Wiggins.

All That We Touch is a UTS Impact Studios podcast. Executive producer is Sarah Gilbert.