UPDATING MY BRAIN with ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

AI, AI, AI, AI.  Every news outlet, every day, there’s a story about the explosion of Artificial Intelligence and the race by competitors to change our lives, our world. 

Actually, I believe it.  I believe all of it.  Artificial intelligence will change the world and whether sooner or later, when that happens millions of jobs will be replaced with more efficient computer-performed tasks – in fact, a good project for AI might be to figure out how to fix the global economy when that happens!

But WHEN?  How fast?  In my lifetime?  Maybe, if I quit eating sweets and keep working out.

I want to try to frame this up a bit for us, the Stubbornly Young – for our own understanding, and for conversations with those younger people in our lives with whom we want to stay relevant.

I read an excellent article, The Secret History of AI, and a Hint at What’s Next, April 22^nd, by Christopher Mims, Technology Columnist at the Wall Street Journal.  I was struck by the balance it created in my thinking about artificial intelligence.  Mims quotes Dr. Cal Newport of Georgetown University in this excerpt from the above reference article:

ChatGPT required that its engineers cram into it more or less all the text on the entire open web, so that it would have enough reference material to be able to remix it in a way that seems like original thinking, but isn’t. Dr. Newport concludes his essay in the New Yorker by saying that “a system like ChatGPT doesn’t create, it imitates.”

Wow, that’s very thought provoking.  AI will remain a topic of intense interest for as far as I can see into the future, so from time to time I’ll share some new thoughts on the subject.