How to Navigate the Real and Immediate Risks of AI
While the risk of AI becoming smarter than humans and taking over the world is often discussed, it can also distract us from a more pressing matter: the real-world, right-now risks of AI. On this episode of Mind Matters News, host Robert J. Marks continues his six-part conversation with Dr. Donald Wunsch about his expert insight into AI. In this segment, Dr. Wunsch discusses some of the real-world risks of AI, including AI-enabled cyber attacks, phishing attacks, cybersecurity, and the potential harms caused by AI’s reinforcement learning algorithms, where AI systems give people more of what they seem to want, even if it’s unhealthy or dangerous. Dr. Wunsch argues that these problems need to be tackled by policymakers, scientists, engineers, and experts from various disciplines working together on the issues.
Additional Resources
- Listen to Part 1 of this conversation: Dr. Donald C. Wunsch: A Level-Headed Approach to AI’s Promise and Peril
- Listen to Part 2 of this conversation: The Ins and Outs of Scaling Up AI: Dr. Donald Wunsch
- Listen to Part 3 of this conversation: Artificial Intelligence: Navigating the Hype, Limitations, and Ethics
- Listen to Part 4 of this conversation: Will AI Make the World Better or Worse?
- Donald Wunsch, “Artificial General Intelligence Is Nowhere Near, Artificial Specific Stupidity Is Already Here—Policy Implications,” IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, November 2025
- Donald Wunsch’s AI news website: CAIAS.mst.edu
