AI: Spring Awakenings

Issue 150, March 7, 2024

We think the onset of Spring is a good time for house cleaning and taking a pause to reassess AI. It has taken over both the imagination and the anxiety of most anyone who has been paying attention. Take a straw poll and you may have two oppositional results. AI is a tool that will help human beings achieve higher levels of productivity and more efficient levels of profitability. Or AI is a threat to national security and humanity as it is the pathway to transcend human cognitive abilities and will supersede the human mind, ultimately taking over humanity.

We would argue that almost anyone who talks about AI does not have a firm grasp of what it is and all its variations, so the public AI narrative is more fiction than truth.

AI and Its Many Flavors

AI comes in many flavors including Machine Learning (ML) which is used to analyze large sets of data to derive patterns and learning. Then there are Chatbots: Open AI, Microsoft Co-Pilot, Google’s Gemini, Adobe’s Firef…