The great fear of AI – voiced by millions, and in particular the two youngest generations – is that AI is here to replace us. That’s not an unreasonable fear, in a social media climate where so many (including more than a few actual industry players) are hell-bent on doomposting exactly that message, day in and out. It’s certainly true that there’s a vast population of capitalists out there who would be quite pleased to cut their workforces by 90% or more. Well, they’re capit

We’ve been well-prepped for maleficent AI by our movies, TV and books for decades now (HAL 9000, Skynet, the Cylons), but we’ve seen enough of the real thing to understand that evil AI in the here-and-now is, well, hovering in the wings. A real thing. A thing to take seriously. We can easily see what that can mean, and it now becomes our task to decide what we can do about it. The first step is figuring out what “good” and “evil” are, in AI terms, and what options we have in

The AI doomscroll is now a 24/7 thing, it looks like. Open any social media channel, day or night, and bam! AI is 1) taking all our jobs, 2) smothering all human creativity, or 3) sacrificing us by the millions to scarf up water for new data centers. And in the midst of all this teeth-gnashing we get word of an experiment by Emergence AI, a US startup that undertook to test several leading AI models to see how well they would do if put in charge of us all. In this experiment,

Among those putting forth predictions of the AI future is the Pew Research Center, which published a June 2023 report summarizing the ...

In the hands-on world that’s coming, the biggest and most impactful threats of AI aren’t likely to be cataclysmic; they’re more probably...

Above, I’ve confessed my anxiety about the future my children and grandchildren are facing, a future fraught with few certainties, other...

Above, we noted the prediction that all human labor – every job humans currently do – will be taken over by AI in the next 12 decades....

There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the potential pitfalls presented by the rapid rise of AI, and justly so: AI is the...

Faced with the possibility of malevolent AI that does us harm – or AI that freely complies when humans use it to harm other humans – what...

The general truth that “anything a human being can do, AI can do better” is in the water supply, and of course that isn’t quite true....

Peter Frase offers a variation on Robert Costanza’s AI outcomes matrix in his book Four Futures: Life After Capitalism. It bears a lot of...

What else should we be thinking about, when AI gets analogical? This necessary step toward artificial general intelligence – connecting a...

Above, Melanie Mitchell has reminded us that the abstract activities of chess and Go – two applications that AI put human beings firmly...

We’ve already noted that Douglas Hofstadter, in his seminal Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, established baselines for both...

When considering our AI future, the new human era of human-machine integration, there are numerous scenarios we are obliged to evaluate....

In 2017, Google’s DeepMind team unveiled AlphaGo Zero, a game-playing AI that was a successor to AlphaGo, which had beaten Lee Sodel, the...

There’s much debate over how soon AI and robots are going to strip away human labor, with predictions (documented elsewhere in this book)...

I have a grandson named JJ. He’s a college freshman, studying to be an engineer. He’s bright, focused, curious, and industrious –...

Much is being written about how human-like generative AI seems, and just as much is being written about how that’s just an illusion;...

You probably see some, if not all, of these headlines every day at this point: AI is going to cause a global financial meltdown AI can do...