Ok, so AI will not give you more time (see part I). And AI can be this huge threat to mankind etc. – according to an increasing collection of experts. Sounds serious, but it’s still kind of distant, isn’t it? So let’s bring it closer to home: Is AI a real…
Inspiration
If you don’t know what it is, it’s OK. It’s a recent invention – not the concept but the name. A ‘prompt engineer’ is an expert in ‘bot relations’. In ‘how to interact with chatbots’. It’s weird, isn’t it? I thought the point with chatbots that we – anyone – can talk to them. I must have been mistaken …
Think about it: We – presumably intelligent human beings – have collectively put the world on a path towards extinction and don’t seem to be able to do much about it. But there is still hope: Our new AI-‘friends’ possess a different kind of intelligence, quite possibly our key to survival, our lifeboat so to speak. But we don’t want help. In fact, now we’re trying to sink the lifeboat. Do we still call ourselves ‘intelligent’?
So the Tesla autopilot has been involved in more than 700 accidents over the past few years. That’s bad, but how bad? That depends on the metric. How do accidents caused compare to accidents prevented? Are autopilots good or bad? The answer: We don’t know.
Want to get back to normal? Be ‘normal’? Don’t. It’s dangerous. It’s about to become lethal.
It’s becoming tiresome, isn’t it? Every week AI is seemingly conquering new territory, doing more things, becoming more capable and more useful – or threatening, depending on point of view. High noise factor, low value because it’s mostly speculation. What about taking the opposite angle: What AI cannot do – would that be more useful?
Is that what you want? Actually, what you want may not matter, you’ll get it anyway. It may come as a surprise, but AI has been predicting the future for a long time – and very successfully. To the extent that we’ve been totally addicted for ages. Oh, we haven’t…
It’s almost like running out of gas, except everyone’s surprised: Oops, this thing runs on gas? Where can we get more and who pays? Of course chatbots don’t run on gas, but they do run on data and the data-pipes are about to close. How can this happen and can this possibly be…
Digital trust hasn’t delivered. In fact, digital trust, blockchains, even Zero Trust – which is a concept, not a product – turned out to be less than trustworthy. The reason? We couldn’t get humans out of the equation. What we got was more complexity, less understanding and centralization instead of the expected democratization – more power…
Tech luminaries (!) want us to pause AI/ChatBot development for 6 months. Many others are jumping on the bandwagon. The message is this: ‘We need to get our bearings straight(ened).’ Which may make sense, but seriously – what are they on?