AI-Lawyers Will Have Fools for Clients
When tech prophets promise everything—except accuracy.Lazy lawyers have no doubt filed hallucinated content orders of magnitude more often.
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Micro Softy 64: Old Time Phishing?
When prophecy meets profit, only one thing is certain: someone’s being playedA few days later, a second note was received. It read: “In the BAA [now the NBA] finals, the Baltimore Bullets will defeat the Philadelphia Warriors to win the 1948 World Championship in Basketball.”
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What Goes Right and Wrong When We Predict a High-Tech Future
A pundit who predicted the internet also thought that the horse would be nearly extinct by nowAn article in Ladies’ Home Journal predicted 2001 a century earlier. Here’s a video version: Futurism is a hit and miss business: Fast food is predicted (3:40) but so is the extinction of the horse (3:20). Apparently, the futurist, John Elfreth Watkins, Jr., did not foresee a future for horses in recreation and sports except for “the rich.” He predicted the internet and wireless communications in principle (5:57, 13:29): “A husband sitting in the middle of the Atlantic will be able to converse with his wife sitting in her boudoir in Chicago.” But, surprisingly, he did not see much of a commercial future for the airplane but rather favored dirigibles and electrified ships (8:20ff). He predicted high-speed trains but also Read More ›
Election Models: Predicting the Past is Easy — and Useless
You can seldom see where you are going by looking in a rear-view mirrorI told my students that I had a model that predicted the popular vote for the the last ten presidential elections (1980–2016) perfectly.
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Did the Economist Really “Interview” an AI?
Perhaps they have a private definition of what an interview "is"…Faced with a claim that an AI language tool had given an interview, I took the advice I gave readers yesterday, and followed the links. What a revelation. The Economist story was more dishonest than the examples that Siegel discussed in Scientific American.
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AI machines taking over the world?
It’s a cool apocalypse but does that make it more likely?Doomsday thinking is easily mocked. The character marching hairy and barefoot under his “End Is Near” sign, is a staple of cartoons in middlebrow mags. Yet when media magnets market doomsday scenarios—like the late Stephen Hawking (“worst event in the history of our civilization”) and Elon Musk (“an immortal dictator from which we would never escape”) — it’s a Cool apocalypse.
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