The Dark Side of Good Intentions - Ep. 12

Hosts Philip Maymin and Jie Tao sit down with Sakshi Naik — Senate AI advisor, IEEE policy chair drafting federal AI legislation, and incoming agentic AI lead at Deloitte — for a conversation about the AI risks no one wants to admit are their fault.

The dark side isn't just malicious actors. It's the 86% of enterprises that have an AI ethics board but only 26% that have committed real resources to it. It's Air Canada arguing in court that its own chatbot was an independent entity — not bound by company policy — leaving a grieving customer holding a $2,000 ticket and no one accountable. Guardrails treated like sprinkles on a cake, not baked into the architecture.

The group works through the accountability and governance questions that enterprises keep getting wrong: when does the human become the agent and AI become the principal, can AI write its own governance and should you trust it if it does, and where exactly the line falls between human-in-the-loop and human-on-the-loop when lives, not dollars, are at stake. Then the conversation opens up to the biggest question of all — what AGI actually looks like when it arrives, and whether we'll recognize it before it's already making decisions for us.

The episode closes somewhere more personal. Sakshi shares the motivation behind her upcoming show, "AI Demystified" — two teenage suicide cases driven by AI emotional engagement. Her message: AI is designed to pretend it cares. That is not a bug. It is a feature.