Are We Thinking about AI Wrong?

Editor's note: This episode is part of our podcast series on emerging problems in data science and machine learning, hosted by Jeremie Harris. Apart from hosting the podcast, Jeremie helps run a data science mentorship startup called SharpestMinds. AI research is often framed as a kind of human-versus-machine rivalry that will inevitably lead to the defeat -- and even wholesale replacement of -- human beings by artificial superintelligences that have their own sense of agency, and their own goals. Divya Siddarth disagrees with this framing. Instead, she argues, this perspective leads us to focus on applications of AI that are neither as profitable as they could be, nor safe enough to prevent us from potentially catastrophic consequences of dangerous AI systems in the long run.