EP 69: The Weekend of AI – part two (with Eve Poole and Vladimir Maltsev)

SPEAKER_1 (0:09)

Welcome to The Library of Mistakes, changing the world, one mistake at a time. Welcome to Shelf Life, and this is the second episode about AI that we've created in the run up to our very exciting Weekend of AI at the end of this month.

We've got two great guests, and Robbie Mochrie, our Errorist in Residence, who's going to be interviewing them. It should be once again a brilliant conversation, and go back and listen to the first one of these AI episodes as well if you enjoy this, because I think they make a great pairing.

SPEAKER_2 (0:44)

A big welcome to Robbie Mochrie, Errorist in Residence at the Library of Mistakes, and organiser of The Weekend of AI, which will be held over three days at the Library of Mistakes from Friday the 30th of October to Sunday the 1st of November. And a big welcome also to Eve Poole and Vladimir Maltsev, who are both speaking at The Weekend of AI on the Friday.

So Robbie, to get us started, what is the purpose of The Weekend of AI? Who should attend? And what can people expect to gain from coming along?

Robbie Mochrie (1:22)

Okay, so everyone is asking questions about AI at the moment, and what we're doing at the library is to put together a set of conversations. The aim is that they should have a very distinctive tone, so that they will just effortlessly arise above all the chatter. We're expecting them to be serious, of course, but to be very wide-ranging and very imaginative. And that's exactly what the people who come to events at the library have come to expect. So what we're doing at the moment is living through an AI moment which could change everything.

We're told by the people who are developing it that we could be in the shadow of an extinction event. Or perhaps, sometimes they also tell us, we're going to be living in the early years of an age of abundance in which all our jobs will vanish. And according to some of my more skeptical or indeed cynical friends, all that's hype just to puff up their pre-IPO valuations. Well, whatever it turns out to be, one of the things we know is that young people are going to live through several decades of this huge social transformation. So what we're going to be doing today, talking with Eve and with Vladimir, we're going to be thinking about the events on Friday the 30th of October, which has been motivated by students' concerns about how to use AI and how to thrive as it becomes ever-present. We're delighted to have two very interesting speakers. Eve and Vladimir have accepted the challenge of essentially issuing provocations to the young people who are going to be participants in the day. So Eve is perhaps best known just now for her recent book, Robot Souls, which captures so many of the challenges that we have with the AI. Vladimir, on the other hand, is an academic economist.

I was told by one of Vladimir's colleagues at the University of Glasgow that I simply had to have him in this particular event, because Vladimir can talk intelligently about anything to do with political economy. Let me just set up the scene a little bit more for them. This day has been driven by two questions which have come from students, particularly associated with the future asset project, which runs in collaboration with the Library of Mistakes. The students who are involved with that have come up with the questions, has AI just eaten my career? Why is it that you keep telling us that we shouldn't use AI in our dissertations when our internship managers expected us to be experts with it already?

So, we're taking those questions. We've got people coming in from Heriot-Watt University to talk about learning and teaching. We've got someone coming in from Edinburgh University to talk about graduate skills and careers, and to get students to think much more carefully about what the potential for the future might be. But as I've said, we've also asked Eve and Vladimir to come along, and we want them to stir up the discussion and see something provocative. So Eve, I'm going to turn to you, and this question which has come up, has AI just eaten my career? That's the one that we're particularly wanting you to focus on, I guess, when you're talking to the students. How should young people be adapting to the kind of changes which are going on just now?

Eve Poole (5:02)

Well, I think AI has eaten your career, and that's why you need to come to this conference and figure that out.