Hot Take: The Future of Life's Call for a Pause on 'Giant AI' - Doomsday or Distraction?

Welcome to our new format: The Good Robot Hot Takes! In these fun, lively, conversational episodes, we (Eleanor and Kerry) discuss some of the biggest issues in tech, from ChatGPT, and the sexy fembot problem in Hollywood film, to why predictive policing is a scam and why gender recognition is garbage.

This week we're talking about the Future of Life Institute's open letter calling for an AI 'pause' in the wake of ChatGPT. We explore framing large language models as 'foundational' and therefore inevitable, the dangers of AI 'race' rhetoric, why AI's long term harms are given way more attention than its more immediate ones, and how race and gender shape what 'counts' as existential risk.

EDIT - This episode has been re-uploaded to make a correction. Bostrom is associated with the Future of Life Institute, but he is not the Founder or a Founding member, as we originally stated.