Sleepwalking ...

A robot prototype being developed by Yuhang Hu, a doctoral student in the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University, where engineers are exploring the possibility of self-aware robots.

Credit...Karsten Moran for The New York Times

For years, BRT has talked about the ramifications of AI, the open-ended tech forever to remain unknowable due to the fact real time code is required to enable software to react in real time to the vagaries of the real world, something human programmers can't do in any way, shape or fashion. Combine this with the fact AI is now teaching itself and evolving at speeds beyond the kin of man, something quietly disquieting to anyone knowing just how disruptive this tech can truly become.

Pandora's box has been opened ...

Lawrence Alma-Tadema's water-colour of an ambivalent Pandora, 1881

On a sunny morning this past October, the Israeli-born roboticist sat behind a table in his lab and explained himself. “This topic was taboo,” he said, a grin exposing a slight gap between his front teeth. “We were almost forbidden from talking about it — ‘Don’t talk about the c-word; you won’t get tenure’ — so in the beginning I had to disguise it, like it was something else.”

That was back in the early 2000s, when Dr. Lipson was an assistant professor at Cornell University. He was working to create machines that could note when something was wrong with their own hardware — a broken part, or faulty wiring — and then change their behavior to compensate for that impairment without the guiding hand of a programmer. Just as when a dog loses a leg in an accident, it can teach itself to walk again in a different way.

This sort of built-in adaptability, Dr. Lipson argued, would become more important as we became more reliant on machines. Robots were being used for surgical procedures, food manufacturing and transportation; the applications for machines seemed pretty much endless, and any error in their functioning, as they became more integrated with our lives, could spell disaster. “We’re literally going to surrender our life to a robot,” he said. “You want these machines to be resilient.”

Acceleration 2Step applies ...

The Rise of OpenAI

The San Francisco company is one of the world’s most ambitious artificial intelligence labs. Here’s a look at some recent developments.

• ChatGPT: The new cutting-edge chatbot is inspiring awe, fear, stunts and attempts to circumvent its guardrails, our technology columnist writes.
• DALL-E 2: The system lets you create digital images simply by describing what you want to see. But for some, image generators are worrisome.
• GPT-3: With mind-boggling fluency, the natural-language system can write, argue and code. The implications for the future could be profound.

Any questions?

Alex Eben Meyer