The Future of Technology and Humanity with Craig Smith

Can you share insight about your background and what led you to create the Eye on AI podcast? What do you hope listeners gain from each episode?

I spent my career abroad as a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and then The New York Times. In 2016, I returned to North America to work on Canadian stories. While in Canada, I was doing a story on Toronto’s emerging role as a hi-tech center and that led me to spending an afternoon with Geoff Hinton. Hinton introduced me to neural nets. I wrote a profile of Hinton for the NYT but that afternoon had such an impact on me that I started focusing exclusively on AI – going to conferences, taking online courses, etc. While at conferences, I had the opportunity to interview many leading researchers, but the NYT was not interested in stories about them so I started the podcast as a vehicle for me to interview senior AI people. I did not consider an audience at that time, only my own interest. However, the podcast grew organically and by the time ChatGPT was introduced to the public, the podcast was well established.

You’ve had the chance to speak with many leading experts in AI. Are there any recent insights from past guests that have particularly resonated with you or shifted your perspective on the field?

Each conversation adds to my understanding and shifts my perspective. Most recently, my conversation with Ece Kamar at Microsoft about agents has made the concept of a ‘society’ of agents a focus of my interest. I believe that in ten years, our economy will be very different with much of the routine work done by such agentic networks. 

There’s a lot of concern about AI disrupting jobs and personal autonomy. From your discussions on Eye on AI and personal insights, how do you see AI enhancing our lives and creating new opportunities, instead of replacing roles?

While there certainly will be job disruption, just as steam power disrupted a lot of animal power and manual labor jobs, I think it will quickly become clear that humans don’t want to interact very much with AI. Humans crave human connection, human empathy. Automated empathy is neither genuine nor satisfying. So, for example, while AI will eclipse the diagnostic power of human doctors, doctors will be valued for their communication skills, bedside manner, and empathy. The same with customer service, or entertainment, art – humans will be increasingly valued for their humanity as AI takes over less creative, rote tasks. This will change the nature of many jobs, but ultimately make them more fulfilling.

Looking ahead, what trends or emerging technologies do you see shaping the next wave of AI, and which areas are you most excited to explore in future episodes?

Agentic workflows and societies of agents will shape the next wave of AI. The spread of reasoning models beyond OpenAI’s proprietary models will also increase the power of AI systems. On the research side, I expect work on world models, which learn through direct interaction with the physical world rather than through the intermediation of text, to create powerful new learning paradigms that will get us closer to AGI. On the application side, every scientific field will make mindboggling progress that will redefine many areas of human life: personalized medicine with drugs designed for each person’s individual DNA profile, new plants and materials to help mitigate climate change, AI driven financial trading systems that will fundamentally alter how markets operate. It’s going to be wild.