Lawfare Daily: Prophecy, Prediction, and Power with Carissa Véliz
7/10/202633 min
On today’s episode, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Carissa Véliz, an associate professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and the Institute for Ethics in AI, as well as a tutorial fellow at Hertford College, at the University of Oxford. They speak about Véliz’s paradigm-shifting, free-ranging new book, “Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI,” including discussions on the history of prediction, why a healthy democracy—and a life well lived—requires uncertainty, and Véliz’s belief that “artificial intelligence is the new Oracle of Delphi and tech executives the new prophets.”
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 10:00
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Speaker 20:25
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Carissa Véliz· Guest0:38
[upbeat music] We use numbers when we don't trust people, and we forget that people come up with the numbers, and the numbers [laughs] are not as objective as we would like them to be. And big tech is just the latest iteration of that.
Tyler McBrien· Host0:56
It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Tyler McBryan, managing editor of Lawfare, with Carissa Véliz, an associate professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford.
Carissa Véliz· Guest1:10
It's very easy to have the temptation of, "I just want to know. I just wanna be prepared." But that kind of attitude terrifies us. It pushes us into asking prophets to essentially tell us what to do. And, and what we're saying is, "I'm scared. I don't know what to do. Just tell me what to do." And that's very dangerous because it's giving away our power.