Yesterday’s AI interview on FOX 13 News Tampa

Here it is — the recording of my interview on the 4:00 p.m. news on FOX 13 Tampa with anchor Chris Cato, where I answered more questions about artificial intelligence:

In this quick interview, we discussed:

• The “existential threat to humanity” that AI potentially poses: My take is that a lot of big-name AI people who fear that sort of thing are eccentrics who hold what AI ethicist Timnit Gebru calls the TESCREAL (Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism) mindset. They’re ignoring a lot of closer-to-home, closer-to-now issues raised by AI because they’re too busy investing in having their heads frozen for future revival and other weird ideas of the sort that people with too much money and living in their own bubble tend to have.
• My favorite sound bite: “The Terminator is not a documentary.”
• A.I. regulation: Any new technology that has great power for good and bad should actually be regulated, just as we do with nuclear power, pharma, cars and airplanes, and just about anything like that. A.I. is the next really big thing to change our lives — yes, it should be regulated.” There’s more to my take, but there’s only so much you can squeeze into a two-and-a-half minute segment.
• Cool things AI is doing right now: I named these…
  • Shel Israel (who now lives in Tampa Bay) is using AI to help him with his writing as he works on his new book,
  • I’m using it with my writing for both humans (articles for Global Nerdy as well as the blog that pays the bills, the Auth0 Developer Blog) as well as for machines (writing code with the assistance of Studio Bot for Android Studio and Github Copilot for iOS and Python development)
  • Preventing unauthorized access to systems with machine learning-powered adaptive MFA, which a feature offered by Okta, where I work.
• My “every 13 years” thesis: We did a quick run-through of something I wrote about a month ago — that since “The Mother of All Demos” in 1969, there’s been a paradigm-changing tech leap every 13 years, and the generative AI boom is the latest one:

• And finally, a plug for Global Nerdy! This blog has been mentioned before in my former life in Canada, but this is the first time it’s been mentioned on American television.

I’ll close with a couple of photos that I took while there:

Once again, I’d like to thank producer Melissa Behling, anchor Chris Cato, and the entire Fox 13 Tampa Bay studio team! It’s always a pleasure to work with them and be on their show.