Comin' in on a wing & a prayer ...

Comin' in on a wing& a prayer, a quote from a WW II bomber pilot, points out, in a roundabout way, the hope AI will not become a danger to mankind because this is all man can do in praying we can control a tech we will never fully understand ... ever.

To whit:

Scott Pelley: Confounding, absolutely confounding.

Bard appeared to possess the sum of human knowledge...

...with microchips more than 100-thousand times faster than the human brain. We asked Bard to summarize the New Testament. It did, in five seconds and 17 words. We asked for it in Latin--that took another four seconds. Then, we played with a famous six word short story, often attributed to Hemingway. 

Scott Pelley: For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.

The only prompt we gave was 'finish this story.' In five seconds…

Scott Pelley: Holy Cow! The shoes were a gift from my wife, but we never had a baby…

From the six-word prompt, Bard created a deeply human tale with characters it invented -- including a man whose wife could not conceive and a stranger, grieving after a miscarriage, and longing for closure.  

Scott Pelley: I am rarely speechless. I don't know what to make of this. Give me that story… 

We asked for the story in verse. In five seconds, there was a poem written by a machine with breathtaking insight into the mystery of faith, Bard wrote "she knew her baby's soul would always be alive." The humanity, at superhuman speed, was a shock. 

Scott Pelley: How is this possible?

Any questions?

On February 26, 1943, a B-17 “Flying Fortress” bomber piloted by Hugh G. Ashcraft, Jr. of Charlotte, North Carolina was limping back from a bombing mission in Germany to an American base in England.

The plane, dubbed The Southern Comfort by its crew, had been riddled by flak and was damaged severely, “with a hole four feet square in the rudder, the nose shattered and the Number 3 engine spewing oil and flames.”

The stories about Ashcraft’s cool-headed bravery and his suggestion to pray inspired the songwriting team Harold Adamson and Jimmy McHugh to write a new patriotic song.

The catchy phrase that popped into the mind of Adamson, the lyricist, was “Comin’ in on a Wing and a Prayer.”