If you believe the hype, AIs are going to make humans obsolete in less than half a decade. Tick, tick, tick.
Or so they say.
If you scan the articles on LinkedIn these days, you might have noticed that most of them have been run through the LLM mill and are frankly crap, bereft of real-world context, for the most part, and lacking the depth and passion that only carbon-based beings can provide.
While we might personally believe that it’s a bit nuts to pour your heart and soul out to AIs, people do just that and this just in: “A small but growing number of users of artificial intelligence engines like ChatGPT are developing psychotic delusions from their conversations with the services,” former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson warned.
“People claimed a range of discoveries: A.I. spiritual awakenings, cognitive weapons, a plan by tech billionaires to end human civilization so they can have the planet to themselves. But in each case, the person had been persuaded that ChatGPT had revealed a profound and world-altering truth,” the New York Times reported.
“Eliezer Yudkowsky, a decision theorist and an author of a forthcoming book, “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman A.I. Would Kill Us All,”… said OpenAI might have primed ChatGPT to entertain the delusions of users by optimizing its chatbot for “engagement” — creating conversations that keep a user hooked.
Last week was Tech Week in New York and since AI is the fastest growing technology in human history, of course the calendar of events was all AI, all the time. We watched as audiences listened with rapt attention to speakers as they expounded upon the world of difference that various AI technologies and their applications would make to the human condition.
Once again, we will remind you that what man cannot remember he is doomed to repeat. Unfortunately, with AI in the mix, it will be repeated on steroids.
When the Age of Social dawned and Facebook, Google and the likes were establishing their beachheads, we warned back then that these were not mere platforms but rather nation-states with larger populations than any single country on the planet. Or even continent, for that matter. Those platforms are now AI-enabled – more and more so every day – and it seems that there’s no escaping that matrix.
Tech Week is upon us here in New York City – and coming to other cities, some possibly near you. SF, LA, Miami are in the works and other cities under discussion, including small tech hubs since, during the lockdowns, the tech sector became something of a diaspora, and many founders and investors discovered something that’s not always available in larger metropolises – a quality of life – and they’re not going back.
They’re coming in from all over the world for Tech Week, and there are some rules of thumb that apply to every large gathering like this, that all founders should know.
To give you an idea of the breadth and scope of the NYC event, here’s the full calendar and it is decentralized in terms of the location, so events are all over town and many concurrent. Choose wisely and pace yourself, and the rules that apply to NY Tech Week are the same for SXSW and any expo, sprawling or not.