In my writing and rhetoric courses, students have plenty of opinions on whether AI is intelligent: how well it can assess, analyze, evaluate, and communicate information.
When I ask whether artificial intelligence can “think,” however, I often look upon a sea of blank faces. What is “thinking,” and how is it the same or different from “intelligence?”
The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has secured unprecedented access to at least seven sensitive federal databases, including those of the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security Administration. This access has sparked fears about cybersecurity vulnerabilities and privacy violations. Another concern has received far less attention: the potential use of the data to train a private company’s artificial intelligence systems.
The White House press secretary said government data that DOGE has collected isn’t being used to train Musk’s AI models despite Elon Musk’s control over DOGE. However, evidence has emerged that DOGE personnel simultaneously hold positions with at least one of Musk’s companies.
In the competitive arena of global technology, China’s ambitions in artificial intelligence stand out – not just for their scale but for their distinct strategic approach.
In 2017, the Chinese Communist Party declared its intent to surpass the United States to become the world leader in AI by 2030. This plan, however, is less about pioneering novel technologies and more about strategically adapting existing ones to serve state economic, political, and social objectives.
Congress has made significant progress during the Biden-Harris administration in the areas of infrastructure, health care, climate change, and record investments in the economy. Unfortunately, that progress has not extended to any significant technology regulation, a legislative disgrace that should be cause for national concern.
The United States is in the grips of a loneliness epidemic: Since 2018, about half the population has reported that it has experienced loneliness. Loneliness can be as dangerous to your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day according to a 2023 surgeon general’s report.
It is not just individual lives that are at risk. Democracy requires the capacity to feel connected to other citizens in order to work toward collective solutions.
In the face of this crisis, tech companies offer a technological cure: emotionally intelligent chatbots. These digital friends, they say, can help alleviate the loneliness that threatens individual and national health.
There are alien minds among us. Not the little green men of science fiction, but the alien minds that power the facial recognition in your smartphone, determine your creditworthiness, and write poetry and computer code. These alien minds are artificial intelligence systems, the ghost in the machine that you encounter daily.
But AI systems have a significant limitation: Many of their inner workings are impenetrable, making them fundamentally unexplainable and unpredictable. Furthermore, constructing AI systems that behave in ways that people expect is a significant challenge.
Numerous government agencies, including the FBI, Department of Defense, National Security Agency, Treasury Department, Defense Intelligence Agency, Navy, and Coast Guard, have purchased vast amounts of U.S. citizens’ personal information from commercial data brokers. The revelation was published in a partially declassified, internal Office of the Director of National Intelligence report released on June 9, 2023.
The rise of ChatGPT and similar artificial intelligence systems has been accompanied by a sharp increase in anxiety about AI. For the past few months, executives and AI safety researchers have been offering predictions, dubbed “P(doom),” about the probability that AI will bring about a large-scale catastrophe.
Artificial Intelligence-powered tools, such as ChatGPT, have the potential to revolutionize the efficiency, effectiveness, and speed of the work humans do.
And this is true in financial markets as much as in sectors like health care, manufacturing, and pretty much every other aspect of our lives.
ChatGPT and similar large language models can produce compelling, humanlike answers to an endless array of questions – from queries about the best Italian restaurant in town to explaining competing theories about the nature of evil.
The technology’s uncanny writing ability has surfaced some old questions – until recently relegated to the realm of science fiction – about the possibility of machines becoming conscious, self-aware, or sentient.
Suppose an intelligent machine deems you guilty of a crime. Suppose the police were to treat the machine’s judgment as evidence of your guilt. Would it matter that you are actually innocent?
This hypothetical was once a plot device of dystopian novels and films. As law enforcement agencies increasingly rely on traffic cameras, cell phone data, and other information technologies, we should take care that fiction does not become reality.
