The book event at Waterstones Cambridge between Diane Coyle and Verity Harding, author of AI Needs You: AI Needs You: How We Can Change AI’s Future and Save Our Own, delved into how we might go about ensuring that AI is used for human flourishing.
The book has three big case studies which in different ways illustrate ways of thinking about both enabling and controlling powerful technologies: the Space race and the United Nations’s Outer Space Treaty of 1967; the way the UK went about regulating the novel — and potentially dangerous — technology of in-vitro fertilisation (IVF); and the creation and evolution of the Internet in the period before 9/11.
In conversation with Diane and members of the audience, Verity shared an impressive range of experience in both AI (she was an early hire at DeepMind) and politics (she worked for Nick Clegg when he was Deputy Prime Minister).
AI Needs You: AI Needs You: How We Can Change AI’s Future and Save Our Own is published by Princeton University Press.