To the editor: It might be simple to conclude that contributing author Matt Lewis is just too younger to have learn the heavyweight press within the Nineteen Seventies, when the media had simply found the microchip (“AI will probably be extra disruptive than COVID. Which social gathering can seize the second?,” Aug. 15). He would have learn countless screeds about what number of tens of millions could be put out of labor, with their expertise on the junk heap, agonizing over how we’ll ever fill these countless hours of leisure.
It didn’t occur. And but our recollections are so quick that once more we discover acres of newsprint stuffed with the declarations of pundits telling us that many extra tens of millions of jobs will probably be worn out by the irresistible energy of synthetic intelligence. We have to face the truth that the potential of AI to take over our every day life is grossly exaggerated. That is already turning into apparent. Simply pay attention to the variety of courtroom instances which were thrown out as a result of the citations dug up by AI have been nonsense. A main examine on youngsters’s well being promoted by the Division of Well being has been proven to be primarily based on references collected by AI which are both nonexistent or fatally flawed.
The info on which AI bases its pronouncements is all printed data. A lot of it’s misinformation. The concept massive language fashions will be capable to study to inform the distinction is pie within the sky.
Rory Johnston, Hollywood
This author is a co-author of the 1985 ebook “The Data Machine: Synthetic Intelligence and the Way forward for Man.”
