Trust and Tech

Wisdom of Crowds

The Lyceum Movement is a nationwide grassroots organization that aims to build a healthier public discourse by bringing diverse groups of people together to investigate first principles. Every August, Lyceum hosts a big event in Des Moines: the Tallgrass Ideas Festival. And for the last three years, Wisdom of Crowds has been there, hosting a live taping of our podcast.

This year, the Festival’s theme was trust. We hosted an episode about trust and technology, a topic on everybody’s mind. Our two guests were Daniel Corrigan, a philosophy professor at Iowa State University who focuses on the theory and practice of rights, and August Lamm, an artist, activist and writer who has distinguished herself by leading an active creative life completely off the grid — in New York, to boot. This was an engaging conversation about AI, work, time and happiness. I think it’s one of our best this year.

Santiago Ramos starts the conversation with a quote from the late Henry Kissinger, who claimed that trusting AI requires more blind faith than the scientific method. Are we becoming less modern when we trust the “mechanical oracle” of AI? What does it mean to trust AI? Daniel, in his philosophical way, clarifies the terms. We can only trust people, he says, not machines. Machines can be reliable, but not trustworthy. So the question is: do we trust the companies that make the machines? August, for her part, says that we need to go back to first principles. Why do we need these machines in the first place? Why do we need social media? Why do we need AI? Why do we need everything to be so fast?

The episode concludes with some interesting questions from the audience, about AI and natural resources; the difficulty discerning reality from fantasy; and how we can make software better. It’s well worth your time.

Required Reading:

* The Kissinger quote comes from this article.

* Palantir’s one-pound contract with the British NHS.

* Lyceum Movement.

* Tallgrass Festival of Ideas.

* Daniel Corrigan webpage on Philpapers.

* August Lamm’s homepage.

* Santiago Ramos, “The People v. the Oracle” (WoC).

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