Ezra Klein: the public intellectual as AI critic

Last update: Sunday 4/23/23

 

According to Wikipedia, "The term public intellectual "describes the intellectual participating in the public-affairs discourse of society, in addition to an academic career." The editor of this blog frequently cites Wikipedia definitions of important concepts, but he was surprised and disappointed by the narrow academic focus of its definition in this case. Ezra Klein is not a tenured professor in a university and does not have a PhD, the union card usually required for admission to tenure. But neither did Walter Lippmann, one of this nation's first and most eminent public intellectuals 

Ezra Klein is a journalist with a bachelors degree from a prestigious university, same as Lippmann. Like Lippmann in the early 20th century, Klein has been an incisive explorer of issues that were or should have been at the top of our public agenda in the early 21st century. And like Lippmann, Klein has striven mightily to explain complex issues to concerned voters in order to enable these voters to make informed decisions when they go to the polls.  In recent months, Klein has confronted the complex challenges posed by ChatGPT and related technologies in his columns and podcasts for the New York Times, a few of which are cited in the following bullets:

• "The Imminent Danger of A.I. Is One We’re Not Talking About", Ezra Klein, NY Times, 2/26/23
  
  
• "A.I. is about to get much weirder: Here's what to watch for", Guest = Kelsey Piper (VOX), The Ezra Klein Show (podcast with transcript), 3/21/23
  
  
• "Why A.I. Might Not Take Your Job or Supercharge the Economy", Guest = Ezra Klein. Klein answers listeners' questions about ChatGPT, The Ezra Klein Show (podcast with transcript), 4/7/23 
  
  
• "A.I. Vibe Check With Ezra Klein, and Kevin Tries Phone Positivity", Ezra Klein is the guest, HardFork (podcast with transcript), 4/7/23 
  
  
• "What Biden's Top AI Thinker Concluded We Should Do", Guest = Alondra Nelson (former deputy director and acting director of the Biden White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy), The Ezra Klein Show (podcast with transcript), 4/11/23
  

Ezra Klein is brilliant and well informed; but he is not an AI expert, so his incisive comments illuminate the limits of what can be understood about large language models (LLMs) and other AI technologies by non-experts. In other words, he embodies the outer limits of what concerned voters need to know and what concerned voters should expert their public officials to know when they develop policies for regulating these technologies.

As Klein has pointed out again and again, we cannot let profit-oriented corporations -- like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook -- regulate themselves in the development of AI because profit-oriented corporations will use these powerful technologies to persuade the members of our society to buy products and services that they may not need, that might actually be harmful their users and, far worse, that might have unanticipated dire consequence for our entire society.

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Links to related notes on this blog:  

• "Useful AI News" ... This twice-weekly news guide tracks #LargeLanguageModels and other useful AI tools, Updated twice per week