When I was in sixth grade, I read a short story in my English class that has remained constant in my mind to this day. I’m fairly certain it is the only thing from sixth grade left in my brain. (Actually, I read two such stories. The other was Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron,’ which now seems almost impossibly prophetic.) The story was a study in American society by Peter De...
My thinking about AI has changed. I have long expected that sentience or self-awareness for artificial intelligences would come about when we could use a fundamentally new kind hardware. I theorized that as long as the basic computational model for machine language was binary, AI would not rise to the level of consciousness. In fact, I thought that sentience would arise as an emergent phenomenon...
ChatGPT is not an AI with an independent personality and plans of its own, like HAL or IBM. Not yet. The wild popularity of ChatGPT ensured that if people might call a technology AI, they will call it AI. No matter how far the tech is from actually being AI. This is because AI is exciting. When most people hear the word AI, they think of something like Skynet or HAL. They think...