Listen Now
Transcript for Season 4 Trailer
[theme music]
Sundar Pichai: AI is one of the most profound things we are working on.
BBC: ChatGPT, maybe you’ve heard of it.
Bloomberg: We are entering a new epic: The Age of AI.
Gary Marcus: AI that drives cars and diagnoses diseases. Virtual assistants that help us through our daily lives. Robots that take care of us as we age and clean our homes…
All of this seems closer than ever. But none of it is quite here… not yet.
AI might bring us to the brink of utopia… or it could usher us into a dystopia of our own making, flooding us with disinformation or displacing our jobs. Whatever our fears and dreams are for AI, we need to come to grips with it… Soon.
I’m Gary Marcus. I’ve spent most of my life, pretty much since I was eight years old, thinking about two things: minds and machines. I’m a cognitive scientist, an author, and an entrepreneur. I built an AI company that I sold to Uber, and have written five books about AI and the human mind.
But like you, I have some questions. For all the promises that have been made over the last seventy years, we still don’t know how to build AI we can really trust. So I’ve talked to some of the smartest people in tech - scientists, journalists, philosophers, engineers - to understand how we got here, and where we need to go to make it work.
Cade Metz: You get into a car that literally has no driver in it. It's amazing.
Missy Cummings: Look, I hate to be the Debbie Downer of technology, because I'm a roboticist and I'm a futurist and I want to see this technology, and I really, really, really wish they could get it together in six months before my daughter gets her license. But they’re not going to, and telling people that they can be hands-free is wrong.
Yejin Choi: We do know how AI in the past really didn’t work very well, and whenever we see a big jump, we might feel like the gap must be very, very small. But my speculation is that that gap might be surprisingly large.
Gary Marcus: This is a show that's about making sense of where AI is now. But it's also about how we got here.
NewsCaster (DC): Watson, the IBM computer, Beat down two of Jeopardy's most successful contestants.
Ken Jennings: I just remember standing there. At that podium thinking, I guess this is what it feels like to be replaceable.
John Kelly: Fast-forward from that game show five years ago and we’re in cancer now.
Dr. Zak Kohane: They said, what about Watson, its solving the problem? It’s not solving the problem, it’s not getting close, they’re making a lot of noise.
Gary Marcus: It's also about the culture surrounding AI. And how that influences what gets made.
Cade Metz: The way Silicon Valley works is once one person starts saying that, everybody has to start saying that. That's the way you attract the money. That's the way you attract the talent. Even if you're fully aware that this type of thing isn't going to happen immediately, you've got to say that because everyone else is saying that.
Gary Marcus: And it's also about hope. I believe in AI. I believe it has the power to solve some of the world’s biggest problems. But for that future to be real, we need to change course.
David Ferruci: The AI I'm imagining would actually help humans with their own cognitive biases.
Suchi Saria: I think there's a lot of places where we can see benefit, but we always have to approach with the humility.
Gary Marcus: I’m your host, Gary Marcus. This is Humans Vs. Machines. Coming this Spring.