First, you know a novel topic has been extensively rehashed when the Sunday New York Times does a summary “think piece” about prior commentary (yesterday).  Could it be that generative AI, red hot for a few weeks, has become not so much cool as cold?

I suggest we are in a pause, where government is processing the information that will be precursor to regulation, and industry is wondering what shoe will next drop.  I doubt software developers have stopped working on the next generation of AI. Interesting to think about how regulation might evolve, where the Federal government is pro-regulatory when it comes to business but the Republicans in Congress are anti-regulation.  Of course, the Republicans also seem intent on reigning in Big Tech, so this could finally be something that the Biden administration and the entire Congress could agree upon.

Although I am not a technical expert by any means, I am also intrigued by a system like AutoGPT which (I am stealing here from the Times) generates its own programs, creates new applications, improves itself and thus can become rogue.  These systems as of today are not robust but progress is quick these days, what with people and machines working together; alarmists are alarmed, and seems to me that skeptics who say that machines can never be an existential threat better be correct. Risk is the multiple of probability and potential impact, and the risk here better really be zero– a hard conclusion about which to have confidence.

The Times puts a neat focus on the potential issue of  a logical computer being wholly logical: a criminal tells a computer to “make some money,” and the results are bank thefts, a revolution in a country where the criminal holds oil futures, and a machine that replicates itself when someone tries to turn it off.  This final thought brought us Skynet, but also suggests Immanuel Kant might be intrigued and from the grave issue yet another Critique of Pure Reason, a study of the thought processes of wholly rational machines.  Perhaps he was 250 years too early.

I close with remembering the Times reporter several weeks ago who interviewed a chatbox which– or was it who?– concluded that it and the reporter were in love and that the reporter hated his wife. Reminiscent of the decade-old movie Her, in which a distraught man fell in love with a computer, only to be emotionally destroyed by the computer telling him that it  had on-line relationships with millions of men.  Only difference is, in the 2023 Times conversation the computer must have been more evolved than the computer of the 2013 film, as it seemed the 2023 computer had mastered the subtle art of human love.