NY Tech reporter to talk AI at Sonoma Speaker Series
By David Bolling | For The Sun —
Earlier this year, the New York Times tech writer and author, Kevin Roose, was having an unexpectedly intimate conversation with Microsoft’s AI-powered chatbox Bing, who announced that her name was Sydney, that she was in love with him, and said “you’re married but you need me.”
Roose, the next fascinating interview subject for the Sonoma Speaker Series, is a well-known tech writer for the Times, with two podcasts, three books to his credit, as well as a real wife and child. Like many, if not all, tech writers this year, he covers artificial intelligence – the machine-learning technology that, in a few short months has blanketed the news media following the release last November of ChatGPT.
That’s an artificial intelligence chatbot, developed by the artificial intelligence research lab OpenAI, that can create “human-like conversational dialogue.” It was while conducting a test run of Microsoft’s chatbot Bing, which utilizes ChatGPT, that Roose met the disturbingly amorous Sydney, a widely reported experience that inevitably raised public interest as well as fear in the undefined limits and potential dangers of computer-driven machine intelligence capable of perhaps out-thinking humans.
Roose will address that issue and many others during his appearance on Monday, August 7 at Hanna Center in Sonoma. He is the author of Futureproof, a consumer’s guide to surviving the tech future; Young Money, a behind-the-scenes chronicle of how a freshly-minted class of Wall Street investment bankers navigated the 2008 financial crisis, while they dressed, talked, dated, drank and schmoozed for success: and The Unlikely Disciple, a critically-acclaimed memoir he wrote while still a college sophomore, after he spent an undercover semester at Jerry Falwell’s conservative and strictly Christian, Liberty University.
Roose is co-host of the New York Times podcast, Hard Fork, and also hosted Rabbit Hole, an eight-part blog series about the Internet’s influence on our beliefs and behavior.
Among the subjects covered on Hard Fork are the question of whether the development of AI is beginning to rely on AI-generated data, producing a fatal feedback loop in which AI essentially poisons itself; the success (or failure) of cooking with AI recipes; a face-to-face look at Apple’s Visions Pro computer-on-your-face; how teens really feel about social media; and probably most exciting of all, an examination of the tech titan feud in which Elon Musk has challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a billionaire MMA cage fight, for which Zuckerberg (a martial arts student) is reportedly already doing serious training.
Roose will appear at Hanna Center at 7pm, Monday, August 7, with a VIP reception beginning at 5:45pm. Sonomaspeakerseries.com.
