A Plausible Argument

“The possibility that artificial intelligence will steal all our jobs has been hyped by industry leaders. It has roused politicians to sound the alarm. It now ranks at or near the top of the public’s concerns about the new technology.” Is it the right thing to be worried about? I’ll have an answer for that question when AI replaces me. Zeynep Tufekci with some interesting takes on the matter in the NYT (Gift Article): The Unstoppable Force of A.I. Hype Is Meeting One Immovable Fact. “Air Canada disabled its chatbots after they mistakenly promised a customer a refund — and the customer sued and won. McDonald’s scuttled the bot taking orders at its drive-throughs after a number of viral videos showed it to be wildly dysfunctional. In one case, the bot mistakenly added hundreds of dollars of chicken nuggets to a customer’s order. These scary — OK, OK, funny — incidents aren’t the result of coding errors. They’re the result of an essential, inescapable fact about the artificial intelligence that has become so common in so many aspects of our daily lives: Large language models are not reasoning machines. They’re plausibility engines.”