Biden s AI Boondoggle – The American Mind

Who is the greater fool, Polybius asked: someone who milks a billy goat or the one who holds a sieve to catch it? The first is Silicon Valley, which has promoted the biggest bubble since the dot-com craze of the late 1990s, and the second is the Biden Administration, which wants to regulate artificial intelligence, the black box that is impermeable to after-the-fact analysis. The saddest part is that AI offers earth-shaking benefits to manufacturing and logistics, an aspect of the technology that Silicon Valley and the Biden Administration have ignored.

A week before the Biden Administration promulgated an Executive Order on AI, one of the most-heralded AI projects came to a crashing halt after California s Department of Motor Vehicles suspended operations of General Motors autonomous driving subsidiary, Cruise. Wired reports, The suspension stems from a gruesome incident on October 2 in which a human-driven vehicle hit a female pedestrian and threw her into the path of a Cruise car. The driverless Cruise car hit her, stopped, and then tried to pull over, dragging her approximately 20 feet. The DMV accused GM of lying about safety features and attempting to cover up the full extent of the snafu.

It turns out that AI doesn t do a very good job of replicating driver intuition. There are billions of possible variants of accident scenarios, and AI models can t game them all in advance. When the machine has to adapt to something new the results can be gruesome.

Prior to the suspension, GM had projected $50 billion in revenue from its driverless car operation by 2030. The subsidiary was valued at $30 billion in a 2021 funding round. A GM spokesman declined to comment on Cruise s most recent valuation, reported the Wall Street Journal on November 16. To be sure, $30 billion is chump change compared to the nearly $1 trillion increase in the market capitalization of Microsoft, the main investor in OpenAI (which operates ChatGPT), and a similar bulge in the market cap of Nvidia, the premier designer of AI processor chips.

Artificial intelligence is an oxymoronic term that can mean, alternately, making machines behave like humans or replacing human drudgework with machine learning. AI does a wretched job of writing sonnets, explaining jokes, or emulating intelligent conversation. It works wonders, though, in picking defective parts off a conveyor belt, informing a farmer when to harvest soybeans, detecting wear and tear on industrial machines, and other menial tasks.

via americanmind.org

David Goldman.

ChatGPT does a better job than I could writing sonnets though I hope I can do just as well emulating intelligent conversation — except chat bots can talk intelligently about nearly any subject. This does not mean Biden’s EO is not just an attempt to stick government’s nose into this technology. However, tech will probably stick its nose into government first.