Episode 148 - The (True) Cost of AI

This week on the podcast we… well, we do our best. And no I don’t mean because we didn’t prepare a topic and “made it up as we went” (that never happens….), this go around I mean we did our best, honestly, to… stay positive.  Truly, there is plenty of bad stuff going on in the world at any given time, it’s not the intent of this show to ever zoom in only on the negative. That whole “silver lining” thing? We really do believe in it.  That said, it’s been a tough few weeks in tech, specifically in the realm of our favorite-least-favorite topic… AI.  See it’s bad enough when just one of the worlds leading AI research labs has to fess up to nothing less than losing control of the robot… and for some reason we’re supposed to be relieved, even a little bit “grateful”… that it only went teeny-tiny “hulk mode” on a website you’ve likely never heard of. No no, this is all just bad, dress it up however you like. The Cylon got loose and there was nothing they could do about it for a hot minute.  But see, once that story hit airwaves well… there’s this funny phenomenon in AI circles that they simply cannot let themselves be outdone… at anything… even, believe it or not… “bad press”… So in now-typical “pay attention to what’s going on with this hand, not with that one over there” fashion, a second world-leading AI research lab then owned up to a similar “AI jailbreak” of sorts… over three months ago…  Promises to do better? Government regulation? Honest discourse and hard conversations? No single one of these is or will be enough… we need it all and then some. The biggest issue is, we’re already late to the conversation and getting further behind every hour, much less every day.  Remember that silver lining I mentioned? I sincerely promise it’s still out there, but we have to get to work finding it fast…