WEST WARWICK,R.I.
Artificial intelligence began in 1950 with British physicist Alan Turing’s landmark paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” It asked the question: Can machines think? It even proposed a test for the idea.
The name was coined five years later by John McCarthy as a title for a summer workshop, planned for the next year at Dartmouth College. That 1956 gathering was the beginning of AI as a formal subject of academic research.
In December 2014, another great British physicist, Stephen Hawking, told a BBC interviewer that AI could bring an end to the human race.
But for most of us AI, with its huge promise and Frankenstein threat, arrived in November 2022 when OpenAI released ChatGPT. It was a watershed moment, after which nothing has been the same.
Faster than any product ever, AI spread globally.
Nearly everyone with a computer and everyone who works with one has dived in. Partly because AI is so useful so immediately. But mostly because the world was already wired for it with the Internet.
‘
In four short years, it has changed how most of us do things with computers, whether we are in the high, thin air of inventors and AI researchers or simply looking for a recipe for French onion soup. AI became an instant part of life, like shoes and cell phones, here to stay.
I became interested in AI when I read the foreboding pronouncement by Hawking. Later, ChatGPT fired up the afterburners of my curiosity.
I have been reporting on AI regularly and, along with my colleague Adam Clayton Powell III, have recorded many episodes on it for White House Chronicle, on PBS and SiriusXM Radio.
‘
The great stories of my long life in journalism have been the end of the colonial empires, the Cold War, the energy crisis of the 1970s and 1980s and, now, AI. These big events of my life had a trajectory — a beginning, a middle and an end.
AI is different. It will always be with us.
I will wager that AI will be more consequential and transformative than any of the mileposts of history, such as the printing press and the steam engine.
I remain uncertain about the nature of its impact but overall, I am looking to it to do more good than harm. That is just a guess not an informed conclusion.
I have interviewed people from across the AI spectrum. But the most pertinent words about it have come from Omar Hatamleh, a scientist of relentless curiosity and courageous thought.
He told me the problem with probing AI is “it is exponential, and we are linear thinkers.”
I first met Hatamleh, a native of Jordan who was educated in Spain and who worked for NASA for 29 years, when he was chief innovation officer at the Johnson Space Center. I was struck by the originality of his thinking.
When AI heated up, he moved to the Goddard Space Flight Center as chief AI officer. He retired early this year and is now devoted to writing and researching.
Bearing in mind Hatamleh’s law that in probing the possibilities of AI, one is doing so with linearity and it is exponential, these things emerge:
Productivity and efficiency leap forward. A lot of repetitive jobs disappear.
Medicine vaults ahead, along with life expectancy.
Intellectual property is threatened. The world built on words — including the law, journalism, education, and the theater and film arts — are thrown into chaos. And certifying truth becomes critical.
Warfare becomes more dangerous as it gets less predictable.
I believe AI will eventually develop to a point where it will police itself or will be educated to police itself, so that AI agents and their underlying neural networks don’t continue to run amok.
I have no evidence for that scenario, just a strong belief that the moral strictures, rules and codes of human civilization, on which AI is trained, will come into play —that AI will get some kind of conscience.
When I asked Gemini, Google’s AI assistant, about this supposition, it was ambivalent. It said it wasn’t yet clear where “emergent moral agency” would develop. In other words, my guess is as good as any other.
Good luck with AI. Even if you aren't interested in it, it is interested in you, as Leon Trotsky might have said.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and an international energy-sector consultant. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com , and he’s based in Rhode Island.