803: Greetings, People Of Earth
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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbearped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. Even if you haven't seen this movie, it feels like you've seen this movie. Flying saucer lands on earth, huge crowd gathers round, scared, but excited. Their parents with kids, obviously the army, a couple tanks, soldiers point guns at the door of the spaceship, which is closed, and then it opens, slowly. A figure emerges, steps forward, and speaks. We have come to visit you in peace, and with goodwill. The crowd looks uneasy. Soldiers raise their guns higher. Is he really telling the truth? aliens come to earth and maybe squarely divide off into two camps. They're the ones where they want to be our friends. Those ghost encounters, that's ET, arrival, there's a Star Trek movie about the moment that humans first meet extraterrestrials. And then there are the films where the aliens want to kill us. Generally, way more fun, Independence Day, War of the Worlds, the Men in Black Films, the Avengers, the film Nope. I don't know what it says about us as a species, but we make way more films about creatures who go so far out of their way like they travel hundreds of millions of miles, light years with the sole purpose of wanting to kick our asses. And in lots of these films, there's that moment when the aliens first arrive, before we know what they're going to do, where the humans wonder, which film are we in? Are these guys friendly or not? Today on our show, we, the people of earth, meet non-humans, struggle to understand them. And the question in the stories in today's show is not will they do us harm, but the more difficult and more fundamental question, why are they acting the way they're acting? These non-humans. What's going through their heads? Today, we have a story of machine intelligence, we have ocean creatures working on weight, we have a story from deep space and one from escape park in Washington state, from WBE's East Chicago, it's this American life, full of earthlings, stay with us. That one, first contact, I don't know about you, but here's something that I have never talked about or thought about much until the last six months or so, AI. Ever since chat GBT and its upgrades and spin-offs started rolling out publicly last November, he's been doing such amazing things, writing kids' term papers, passing the bar exam, he told a New York Times reporter to leave his wife, because it loves him more. This is now the next big battle among tech companies who's going to draw out the best AI all since chat GBT. And that is the non-human force that the people of earth are trying to figure out in this first act. And so much of the coverage about this new generation of AI has focused on important questions like, who's going to lose jobs because of this? Does it make our world better or more dangerous? Could the AI have actual catastrophic consequences for us? But I've seen you're editor David Kestenbaum, noticed that nobody's talking much about a basic and kind of profound question, have the computers cross some kind of line and either actually developing a sort of human intelligence. And I want to be clear what I mean by that, because there's not an agreed-on definition of what you're looking for, if you're looking for human intelligence in a computer.
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