250 episodes

Artificial Intelligence has suddenly gone from the fringes of science to being everywhere. So how did we get here? And where's this all heading? In this new series of Science Friction, we're finding out.

Science Friction ABC listen

    • Science

Artificial Intelligence has suddenly gone from the fringes of science to being everywhere. So how did we get here? And where's this all heading? In this new series of Science Friction, we're finding out.

    01 | The day modern AI toppled humanity's champion

    01 | The day modern AI toppled humanity's champion

    The world is experiencing a boom in artificial intelligence (AI). It's everywhere. In just a few years, computers have learned to paint a picture, write a novel, translate languages and consume the entire internet.

    But how we got here goes back decades to two men who couldn't agree on the best way to teach a thinking machine.

    The AI world was divided. Then a new kind of machine beat a human at Go, a game it was never supposed to be able to win.

    • 25 min
    02 | Locked up by AI for a crime he didn't commit

    02 | Locked up by AI for a crime he didn't commit

    As ChatGPT shows us, AI can do some amazing stuff. But it does some creepy stuff as well. And it's already been responsible for locking up innocent people.

    The story of how AI scanned millions of drivers licences and accused Michigan man Robert Wiliams of a crime he didn't commit.

    When human biases lead to neural networks going rogue.

    • 25 min
    03 | The bumpy history of driverless cars and their AI brains

    03 | The bumpy history of driverless cars and their AI brains

    When you think about a driverless car future, perhaps your mind goes to being driven around, watching movies from the backseat and drinking martinis.

    For over a decade, perfect driverless cars have seemed only a few years away. But in reality, they were nowhere close.

    Now, driverless cars are finally being rolled out in some cities.

    But (like humans) they're crashing and causing chaos.

    So are driverless cars finally here? Or is teaching a car to drive simply too difficult?

    • 25 min
    04 | If you control AI, you control the world

    04 | If you control AI, you control the world

    AI is often portrayed as being all about technology. But it is also about money and control. Because those who control AI, may control the world.

    In the AI world, there are two names that keep coming up: OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, and its CEO, Sam Altman.

    Who is Sam Altman? How did his tiny company leapfrog the tech giants and win the scramble for control of AI? And what are Altman's plans for the future?

    • 25 min
    05 | The year the world woke up to AI with a bang

    05 | The year the world woke up to AI with a bang

    2023 was the year powerful new AI technology went mainstream, with image generators and tools like ChatGPT.

    And people quickly started wondering where these advances were taking them.

    This is the story of 2023 in three chapters: the first contact, the backlash that followed, and the new reality.

    It's the story of actors fighting back against plans to replace them with digital clones, writers suing AI companies for stealing their words, and students figuring out how to use their new magical writing tool.

    • 25 min
    06 | Is super-intelligent AI around the corner?

    06 | Is super-intelligent AI around the corner?

    Behind the rise of AI there's big questions about where this technology is going.

    Is it going to be super intelligent — and if that happens — is it going to kill us all?

    In our final episode, we're diving into the future and unpacking the full spectrum of expert predictions, from the idea that we're on the brink of creating human-level AI, to fears that AI will make humanity extinct.

    Come meet our future AI overlords.

    • 25 min

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