Gigaom Voices in AI – Episode 48: A Conversation with David Barrett

Today's leading minds talk AI with host Byron Reese In this episode, Byron and David discuss AI, jobs, and human productivity. Today's leading minds talk AI with host Byron Reese Byron Reese: This is Voices in AI brought to you by GigaOm, I'm Byron Reese. Today our guest is David Barrett. He is both the founder and the CEO of Expensify. He started programming when he was 6 and has been at it as his primary activity ever since, except for a brief hiatus for world travel, some technical writing, a little project management, and then founding and running Expensify. Welcome to the show, David. David Barrett: It's great of you to have me, thank you. Let's talk about artificial intelligence, what do you think it is? How would you define it? I guess I would say that AI is best defined as a feature, not as a technology. It's the experience that the user has and sort of the experience of viewing of something as being intelligent, and how it's actually implemented behind the scenes. I think people spend way too much time and energy on [it], and forget sort of about the experience that the person actually has with it. So you're saying, if you interact with something and it seems intelligent, then that's artificial intelligence? That's sort of the whole basis of the Turing test, I think, is not based upon what is behind the curtain but rather what's experienced in front of the curtain. Okay, let me ask a different question then– and I'm not going to drag you through a bunch of semantics. But what is intelligence, then? I'll start out by saying it's a term that does not have a consensus definition, so it's kind of like you can't be wrong, no matter what you say. Yeah, I think the best one I've heard is something that sort of surprises you.