I'm reading more and more stories about how people are using the so-called "artificial intelligence" services to plan their lives and do all sorts of things. I hear a lot of good things about how people use it to generate letters and crank out reports.
But I'm also reading disturbing stories of people talking to these things and breaking with reality because they're believing that they're talking to a higher intelligence.
I'm shocked because this is kind of what happened before with computers. Salespeople would go around and if a salesperson had just papers and charts you weren't very impressed. But if a salesperson pulled out a screen and they showed the same sorts of things on a screen and used a keyboard to move through the pictures all of a sudden you felt like were dealing with somebody that was so much better and this was modern and much better than anything else.
I'm seeing similar things with the large language model artificial intelligences that are being marketed today. It's scary.
And then I'm reading stories about people as they use these things, starting to ask existential questions about spiritual things and life guidance and all that sort of stuff. And they lose their minds because they think that they're finally connected to the "higher consciousness" that New Agers have been selling all this time.
I do have some hope because I have started seeing stories about how people are pointing out that these things are probably just really fast pattern matchers, and it's not really intelligence, it's just really fast language matching.
And that's what computers do. We make decisions based on a lot of inputs that we don't even understand are happening in our own brains. We're basing them on smells and nerve endings that we don't even realize are feeding us data and we're fast.
And then when a machine is demonstrated to be able to make a yes or no decision a million times faster than we can, at least we think it can, all of a sudden we want to let it tell us how to run our lives and run our operations and do everything for us so that we can go and do other things.
But it's a computer. I'm a human. The computer doesn't rule me. Some people would argue about that too, but that's a different subject.
Large language model artificial intelligences are cool tools that are being adapted and used by early adopters and the rest of us are just kind of trailing along behind going, wow, how did they do that? And why did they do that?
Be careful out there. Remember what you're dealing with.
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