STEM-Talk: Is AI out of control? Could it kill humanity? Ken Ford discusses the real and imagined risks of AI

Could AI kill all humanity? Will AI someday have consciousness similar to humans? How worried should we be about rogue AI agents?

For STEM-Talk’s milestone 200th episode, Dr. Ken Ford sits down with Dr. Dawn Kernagis to answer these listener questions and more about the risks and advances of AI. After we posted episode 198, an Ask Me Anything episode where Ken answered listener questions about chatbots and data centers and the future of AI, we received a new wave of listener questions about AI that Ken addresses in episode 200.

Ken has been working in AI since the 1980s and is well-positioned to address listener questions. The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence elected Ford a Fellow in 2000 for his “leadership in exploring and explaining foundational issues and in establishing large-scale AI research programs and institutions.” In today’s episode, Ken helps listeners sort genuine advances in AI from exaggerated claims.

A few of the listener questions that Ken addresses in this episode include:

— Ford’s thoughts about a team leader at Anthropic, the developer of the chatbot Claude, who shared a post that AI could someday “kill all humans”?

— What evidence do we need that AI systems might someday have consciousness similar to humans?

— Rather than destroying humans someday, is it a greater likelihood that AI will gradually degrade human beings?

— What really happened in July’s Hugging Face incident where OpenAI’s AI agents, operating in a testing environment, broke out, got online, and compromised parts of Hugging Face’s systems?

— Should the AI industry push the pause button and slow the pace of AI development?

— How do we as a society address AI systems that confabulate nonexistent facts?

Also, be sure to check out episode 199, the second of the three-part AMA series, where Ford and Kernagis respond to listener questions about protein, genetics, resistance training and NASA’s plans to return humans to the Moon by 2028.

STEM-Talk is an award-winning podcast from the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition that hosts conversations with the leading minds in science and technology. Listen on your favorite platform or browse our library at IHMC.us/stemtalks.