Perhaps the doomers have a dystopian and exaggerated fear of AI, but a discussion about the new technology’s potential harms still needs to be had.
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Claude was the first chatbot to answer my question correctly. The AI chatbot arms race, however, is just getting started.
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This week, we ran a post covering a new public policy brief from the Institute for Family Studies and the Ethics and Public Policy Center. The brief conclusively demonstrated the tangible harms involved in exposing kids to the online world before they’re ready. The researchers concluded, in addition, that parents should not give their children digital devices. The stakes are too high, from increased risk of mental health disorders to learning impairments. Such warnings have been increasing over the past few years, thanks in large part to the in-depth research of people like Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge. The Atlantic published an article today on how smartphones are hurting kids’ cognitive and learning capacities. Derek Thompson writes, Researchers such as Read More ›
Evidence that existing ideas aren’t so good can be seen in the big startup losses, slow diffusion of technology, and slow rate of productivity improvement.
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I recently received an email invitation from Google to try Gemini Pro in Bard. There was an accompanying video demonstration of Bard’s powers, which I didn’t bother watching because of reports that a Gemini promotional video released a few days earlier had been faked. After TED organizer Chris Anderson watched the video, he tweeted, “I can’t stop thinking about the implications of this demo. Surely it’s not crazy to think that sometime next year, a fledgling Gemini 2.0 could attend a board meeting, read the briefing docs, look at the slides, listen to every one’s words, and make intelligent contributions to the issues debated? Now tell me. Wouldn’t that count as AGI?” Legendary software engineer Grady Booch replied, “That demo Read More ›
80 years later, we are using the same paradigm, with much faster computers and vast data but we still haven’t cracked the mystery of human intelligence.
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It’s downright bizarre to view Big Data as a replacement for human ingenuity and possibility.
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The notion that we’re getting somewhere, making progress, is remarkably durable. It survives wars, financial collapse, riots, scandals, stagnating wages, and climate change (to name a few). Though techno-futurists are also fond of AI apocalypse scenarios, where artificial intelligence somehow “comes alive,” or at any rate uses its superior intelligence to make an autonomous decision to wipe out humanity, much more ink has been spilled this century prognosticating indomitable technical progress, which somehow stands in for human progress generally. But sanguine belief in progress is belied by the actual events of the twenty-first century. Computers have gotten faster and AI more powerful, but digital technology has also been used to spread misinformation, make deep fakes, and conduct relentless cyberwarfare. Financial Read More ›
If our experiences are all just brain chemicals responding to different gradations of light, it would seem nigh impossible to defend beauty.
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If you go through the slideshow provided at the Gizmodo link, you’ll see the blatant distortions in the human faces to the point they’re almost unrecognizable.
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Maybe some people like to read articles written by Dave the algorithm who lives and writes from Fiji, but I am not among them.
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I have friends and colleagues who’ve gone almost religious about LLMs and conversational systems like ChatGPT. They tell me it’s true AGI. I disagree.
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OpenAI is creating technology that, in Altman’s view, apparently needs to be fairly tightly regulated. And yet…he’s responsible for creating it.
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Gratitude expert Robert Emmons writes that it’s impossible to be grateful to oneself.
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According to the Wall Street Journal, Altman was “shocked” that he was ousted at OpenAI. But, he also fostered a close connection with Microsoft.
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Since it doesn’t know anything in the first place, there’s no way to talk it into sanity once it goes insane.
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Any device that supplies evidence in a legal case would need to be evaluated for validity and reliability.
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AI training on itself needs fresh creative material on which to train or algorithms will feed off themselves in recursive cycles and degenerate into nonsense.
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AI might give us impressive answers to our questions. But that doesn’t mean they have a humanlike understanding of what is going on.
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It is wishful thinking to interpret these results and other LLM performances as evidence of logical reasoning.
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