Discussion Group

This morning we held a meeting of our Arnside/Silverdale Discussin Group Baker’s Dozen which has met regularly since 1943.

It was my turn to introduce a topic and I chose to talk for 20 minutes about Artificial Intelligence. This was followed by a 90 minute discussion.

As you can now have access on your iPad to two of the best known AI machines I could have asked one of them to write a four page essay on AI and it would have done so in a couple of minutes or less.
But I chose to prepare in the old fashioned way by watching several videos on YouTube and reading several articles and a couple of books.
My talk covered : 
The history of AI going back to the 1950s and especially to the work of Alan Turing.
Its dvelopment as an academic subject shown by the fact that my younger son and my dil both have Masters Degrees in AI from the University of Edinburgh.
I went on to talk about the latest versions Chatbox GPT4 and Bard which you can try free on your iPad.
These are trained to produce excellent text and voice output. They absorb information equivalent to many miles of bookshelves and from the Internet. In simple terms you end up with an electronic brain which knows vastly more than my brain and has lightening speed access to all of it.
It will write essays for you on any subject, will enter into conversations or arguments with you.

I went on to discuss how it will change lives in many ways for the better for example in medicine, education, business and many more areas.
But it is full of dangers and that is why so many leading researchers are giving warnings.
It is  so clever at reproducing peoples speech and images that we just will not know what we can believe as reality. In politics, warfare and many other areas this could create chaos when misused.
So the key question is control. And if you think controlling the Internet has been difficult, this may be far more challenging.

Thats all folks.