Jonathan Salem Baskin

Maybe our current approach to seeing AI as like the tulip or South Sea crazes, or an imperfect technical tool like an Edsel or laser disc, is indeed our era’s latest bubble, or bubbles.

Not only can AI write in the style of famous poets, but it can also improve on their work.

AI already controls our access to information online, as everything we’re shown on our phones and computer screens is curated by algorithms intended to nudge us toward a particular opinion, purchase decision and, most of all, a need to return to said screens for subsequent direction. I wonder how much of our history, especially the most recent years in which we’ve begun to transition to a society in which our intelligence and agency are outsourced to AI, will survive over time.

Relying on technologies to solve our problems means relying on technologists to define them in the first place, which is a dicey proposition. Remember that social media was supposed to “fix” our problems collaborating and speaking in the public square, and it instead gave us lives spent in suspicious and angry isolation.

Mr. Schmidt is telling us that sometime in the distant future, as we waft clouds of carbon from our eyes and gasp for our next breath, an AI will magically appear and tell us what we should do to save the planet.

How many Oppenheimers are chasing today’s Little Boy AI – a generally aware AI, or “AGI” – without contemplating the broad implications for their intentions…or planning to take any responsibility for them, whether known or as-yet to be revealed?

We know the answers to things like slowing or reversing climate change, for instance, but we just don’t like them. Our problems are social, political, economic, psychological…we don’t need AI to tell us that.

The video of the dancing mushroom robot suggests that the AI sensed the mushroom’s intentionality to move. It’s not necessarily true, since the researchers had to make some arbitrary decisions about which stimuli would trigger what actions, but the connection between the organism and machine is still quite real, and it suggests stunning potential for the further development of an AI that mediates that interchange.

Who needs oversight from ill-informed politicians when the smartest and brightest (and often richest) tech entrepreneurs can arrive at such genius-level conclusions on their own?

Pick your profession or activity and there’ll be ways sooner versus later to use AI to predict our future actions and decide where we can do and what we can access or do, and what we’re charged for the privilege.