AI's Explosion

Modified: 2025-03-11 11:57 AM CDST

A look at how the recent AI explosion evolved.

AI History (Smith, G., & Funk, J. ((2024) When it comes to critical thinking, AI flunks the test. Chronicle of Higher Education.

Shoving AI into Everything--Alex Fitzpatrick

Companies across the U.S. are testing generative AI to boost productivity — with mixed success.

Why it matters: C-suite AI proponents have been pushing a "use it or get left behind" mentality, but it's often up to the rank and file to figure out how to implement AI in their day-to-day work.

What we're hearing: AI is helping workers offload time-consuming menial tasks, and it's handling some complex work better than humans.

Jason Rabinowitz, head of content creation at airline retailing firm ATPCO, told Axios that work that once took days now takes "about two hours" with AI's help to handle complex workflows and multiple spreadsheets.
Rabinowitz also described pitting AI-translated materials against human-translated versions in a "blind trial" — and finding that, so far, the AI-translated versions are "more readable and more accurate."

Reality check: AI's work needs to be checked, and that process is sometimes more time-consuming than not using AI at all.

Workers still worry that generative AI will take people's jobs (with AI proponents countering that, like past disruptive technologies, it will create new, unforeseen jobs).

By the numbers: About 1 in 6 U.S. workers say they're using AI to do at least some of their work, per a recent Pew survey, while another 25% say AI could do at least part of their jobs.

52% of workers are worried about AI's impact, while 32% say it'll reduce job opportunities.
Yet 36% say they're optimistic about AI's potential.

The big picture: AI's value comes down to how it's used, says Alexia Cambon, senior director of research at Microsoft. (Microsoft is a major investor in ChatGPT maker OpenAI and runs a GenAI chatbot called Copilot.)

"There's a command-based approach, where you look at AI and you think, 'AI has to obey me — I'm going to give it a really simple prompt, and it has to do what I want it to,'" Cambon says.
"And then there's the conversation-based approach, which is ... 'I'm going to use it as a thought partner, and I'm going to use it to brainstorm' — and that requires a lot of critical thinking, and that is the preferable way to use AI in a work context."

The other side: Ed Zitron, CEO of PR agency EZPR and prominent AI skeptic, argues that many corporate leaders are pushing AI despite being too disconnected from their companies' day-to-day work to understand its actual use.

"What I think we're seeing is the biggest mask-off in corporate history, of bosses that do not know what they're talking about, that do not touch their businesses, shoving ChatGPT and other generative AI into everything because they don't know how anything works," Zitron says.

Predictions

1956
- Dartmouth College Summer Workshop: John McCarthy: the conference would “proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.”
1965
- Herbert Simon:“machines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work a man can do.”
1970
- Marvin Minsky: in “three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being.”
2008
- Shane Legg: “human-level AI will be passed in the mid-2020s.”
2015
- Mark Zuckerberg: “one of [Facebook’s] goals for the next five to 10 years is to basically get better than human level at all of the primary human senses: vision, hearing, language, general cognition.”
2022:
- Bill Gates: ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) are “every bit as important as the PC, as the internet.”
- Jensen Huang: ChatGPT is “genuinely is one of the greatest things that has ever been done for computing.”
- Geoffrey Hinton: on ChatGPT “I think it’s comparable in scale with the Industrial Revolution or electricity — or maybe the wheel.”
2023:
- Chris Anderson: “Surely it’s not crazy to think that sometime next year, a fledgling Gemini 2.0 could attend a board meeting, read the briefing docs, look at the slides, listen to everyone’s words, and make intelligent contributions to the issues debated?”

Critical Thinking

Robert H. Ennis defines critical thinking thusly:
- “reasonable, reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do.”
- He gives the following critical thinking skills:
  - Open mindedness
  - Being well-informed
  - Assessing the credibility of sources
  - Identifying conclusions, reasons, and assumptions
  - Judging arguments
  - Defending reasonable positions
  - Asking the right questions
  - Knowing how to hypothesize and experiment
  - Defining context specific terms
  - Cautiously drawing conclusions
  - Using all of the items above correctly
Smith and Funk claim that LLMs cannot perform any of the tasks above

They had three LLMs: ChatGPT (OpenAI), Copilot (Microsoft), and Gemini (Google) answer prompts for the following areas:
- Statistics
- Finance
The answers given were wordy and incorrect
The answers showed no evidence of critical thinking
They concluded:
- "we are still a long way from the goal defined by AI boosters like McCarthy, Simon, and Minsky, not to mention the breathless hype emanating from Silicon Valley. For the time being, it looks like we’re going to have to continue to do our critical thinking for ourselves, and teach our students to do the same."
Tell class how you have used a LLM such as ChatGPT

Consciousness

We all experience it, but no one knows what it is

So, how can we imagine machine consciousness

Many of the disasters of science fiction result because of bad programming.

RoboCop

ED-209 malfunctions during test, killing the subject who had dropped his weapon

SkyNet

System gained consciousness and initiated nuclear attack

HAL 9000 (video)

Open the pod bay doors, Hal

I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that.

DishBrain (video) Real Science

DishBrain is about 800,000 neurons grown in a rectangular petri dish

It learned to play Pong by itself after being given motor "cortex" and a sensory "cortex"

NO RULES WERE PROVIDED

In five minutes it was playing Pong at a better than chance level

Is this consciousness?

Is it a machine?

AI Takeover

What about AI Takeover?

Old science fiction theme

Frankenstein (1818)

He wants a wife (video, 1935)

Superintelligence

Bostrom: "any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest"

Unfriendly vs Friendly

Alignment

Make AI values and human values align

Part of AI Safety

Reward Hacking

AI system achieves programmed goal but does so in a way not intended by the programmers

Fitness functions are programmed in

Humans, animals, and AI systems may "discover" new and unforeseen methods of achieving the fitness function

Chimpanzees are difficult to toilet train

NASA wanted to train chimps to use toilets for prolonged space flight

When on the toilet, chimps would receive food pellets when feces dropped into the toilet

One chimp learned to save one pellet and then drop it down the toilet

Reward Hack: the chimp now received more pellets, not what the trainers had designed as the fitness function

A. J. Riopelle, personal communication

Do you worry about AI Takeover?

Military AI

Autonomous Weapons (video) scroll down to video

AI Weapons (video)

Most current AI weapons have some degree of human control

But, how long will that last?

Drone Pilots

US Army RQ-7

US Air Force

RPA pilot (video)

US Navy

Remote pilots get PTSD

Swarming Drones

Drones account for majority of battlefield deaths
Swarming Drones have many purposes
- Military
  - Overwhelm anti-drone defenses
  - Kamikaze drones
- Agriculture
  - Monitor crop health
- Emergency management
  - Locate people in trouble
- Entertainment
  - Light shows
- Control
  - Centralized
  - Decentralized
  - Autonomous
Geometry and AI

These are some of the newer ways AI has evolved

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