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Starting a few decades ago, we began living the apocalyptic science fiction of our youth. Now we are reaching the climax.
So, I glance at the front page of my newspaper (yes, I still get a newspaper), and see that Ian Malcom has quit InGen because he decided bringing back dinosaurs isn’t such a great idea. Except the Jeff Goldblum character in real life is named Geoffrey Hinton, and he quit Google to warn us all about the dangers of Artificial Intelligence, a technology that he helped develop.
Yes, ChatGPT seems to have sprung from nowhere and is suddenly everywhere. The extraordinarily speedy blooming of AI seems faster and more dramatic than the invention of the web browser or the introduction of the smart phone. Yes, it was decades in the making, but it was nearly invisible until a few months ago. Perhaps only the COVID pandemic shocked the system in a similar way — at least in my memory.
And yet the unthinkable is happening again and again. COVID, of course, was the first worldwide pandemic in my lifetime with such extreme effects worldwide. But other developments that transformed the world include the World Wide Web, smart phones, social media, COVID and…
