“AI – Artificial Intelligence”

In the world of artificial intelligence, the idea of “singularity” looms large. This slippery concept describes the moment AI exceeds beyond human control and rapidly transforms society. The tricky thing about AI singularity (and why it borrows terminology from black hole physics) is that it’s enormously difficult to predict where it begins and nearly impossible to know what’s beyond this technological “event horizon.”

h/t DM

James Pethokoukis asks, “Does ChatGPT mean the Technological Singularity is near? How would we know?”

To answer the second question first, we probably wouldn’t. One of the characteristics of a singularity is that you can’t tell when you’re entering it. (And by the time you figure things out, it’s too late.) But looking at Chat GPT and the various AI Art programs that are appearing, I can’t help but see an irony: The jobs that are coming under attack first are the jobs that up to now have resisted technological replacement.

A rogue artificial intelligence system could kill everyone and the technology must be regulated in a similar way to nuclear weapons, MPs have been told.

Researchers from Oxford University told the science and technology committee that AI could eventually pose an “existential threat” to humanity. Just as humans wiped out the dodo, the machines might eradicate us, they said.

ChatGPT, the latest dernier cri in the AI revolution, is all the rage. The chatbot, which provides marvelously sophisticated and in-depth responses to almost any query users enter, took the internet by storm soon after it debuted this past November.

Next month an AI attorney will defend a client in court

In February, the Sun informs us, an artificial intelligence robot will break new ground in the legal world by defending a client in court. The defendant’s phone will relay proceedings to the AI’s server, and the defendant will say only what the AI tells him to, via an earpiece. 

The pursuit of artificial awareness may be humankind’s next moonshot. But it comes with a slurry of difficult questions.

Hod Lipson, a mechanical engineer who directs the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University, has shaped most of his career around what some people in his industry have called the c-word.

On a sunny morning this past October, the Israeli-born roboticist sat behind a table in his lab and explained himself. “This topic was taboo,” he said, a grin exposing a slight gap between his front teeth. “We were almost forbidden from talking about it — ‘Don’t talk about the c-word; you won’t get tenure’ — so in the beginning I had to disguise it, like it was something else.”

AS IF the changes all around us aren’t bewildering enough, a world run by artificial intelligence draws inexorably nearer. With that new pantheon of mini-gods – the technocrats – sitting smugly pretty, it’s hardly surprising. Ostensibly the key question is who will exploit AI to the fullest. There are only two contenders: the US and China.

If we have any hope of retaining our tenuous grasp on reality rather than drowning in a maelstrom of ideological disinformation, our window to wake up is closing fast.

After playing around with ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot making waves for its potential to disrupt education by writing students’ term papers for them, I realized this machine was not exactly unbiased in its political leanings. Its biases, predictably, went in the same direction virtually all Silicon Valley biases tend to go.

After a few quick Google searches—but who knows what additional information Google was keeping from me?—I stumbled on an article from Unherd fittingly titled “ChatGPT is not politically neutral.” 

It is the end of the year, and as much as 2022 has stunk to high heaven, 2023 may not be much better. Of course, there is always the possibility that the Russia/Ukraine conflict will go nuclear, in which case we’re done. But if we somehow manage to continue as a species, will we be worth anything in another 50 years? Maybe not.

In my eclectic reading, I came across a couple of references to ChatGPT, an experiment in artificial intelligence (AI). You ask the AI bot a question, or give it a task, and it spits out an answer, and I must say a pretty good one judging from the task I gave it.

My task to the AI bot: “Write a critical essay on the military-industrial complex.”