At TED AI 2023, experts debate whether we’ve created “the new electricity”
On Tuesday, dozens of speakers gathered in San Francisco for the first TED conference devoted solely to the subject of artificial intelligence, TED AI. Many speakers think that human-level AI—often called AGI, for artificial general intelligence—is coming very soon, although there was no solid consensus about whether it will be beneficial or dangerous to humanity. But that debate was just Act One of a very long series of 30-plus talks that organizer Chris Anderson called possibly "the most TED content in a single day" presented in TED's nearly 40-year history.
Hosted by Anderson and entrepreneur Sam De Brouwer, the first day of TED AI 2023 featured a marathon of speakers split into four blocks by general subject: Intelligence & Scale, Synthetics & Realities, Autonomy & Dependence, and Art & Storytelling. (Wednesday featured panels and workshops.) Overall, the conference gave a competent overview of current popular thinking related to AI that very much mirrored Ars Technica's reporting on the subject over the past 10 months.
