For Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Kendra Peer Lewis in for Rachel Feldman.
In 2022, open AI unleashed chat GPT onto the world.
In the years following, generative AI has wormed its way into our inboxes, our classrooms,
and our medical records,
raising questions about what role these technologies should have in our society.
A Pew survey released in September of this year found that 50% of Americans were more concerned than excited about the increased AI use in their day-to-day life.
Only 10% felt the other way.
That's up from the 37% of Americans whose dominant feeling was concerned in 2021.
And according to Karen Howe, the author of the recent book Empire of AI,
Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's Open AI, people have plenty of reasons to worry.
Karen recently chatted with Scientific American associate books editor Brie Kaine.
Here's their conversation.
I wanted to really jump right into this book because there is so much to cover.
dense book in my favorite kind of way.
But I wanted to start with something that you start the book on really early on is that you are able to be clear eyed about AI in a way that a lot of reporters and even regulators are not able to be,
whether because they are not as well versed in the technology or
because they get stars in their eyes when Sam Altman or whoever starts talking about AI's future.
So why are you able to be so clear headed about such a complicated subject?
I think I just got really lucky in that I started covering AI back in 2018 when it was just way less noisy as a space.
And I was a reporter at MIT Technology Review,