Imagine a future where we interact regularly with a range of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) assistants — and where millions of assistants interact with each other on our behalf. These experiences and interactions may soon become part of our everyday reality. In this episode, host Hannah Fry and Google DeepMind Senior Staff Research Scientist Iason Gabriel discuss the ethical implications of advanced AI assistants. Drawing from Iason's recent paper, they examine value alignment, anthropomorphism, safety concerns, and the potential societal impact of these technologies.

Further reading: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog…

Timecodes:
00:00 Introduction
01:10 Definition of an AI assistant
04:58 A utopic view
6:46 Iason's background
08:12 The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants paper
13:46 Anthropomorphism
14:52 Turing perspective
16:23 Anthropomorphism continued
21:23 The value alignment question
23:52 Deception
29:01 Deployed at scale
30:34 Agentic inequality
33:08 Unfair outcomes
36:40 Coordinated systems
41:05 Tetradic value alignment
44:07 The future
45:06 Reflections from Hannah