Will We Regret A.I.?

The godfather of A.I. fears what he’s built. Plus: the waning days of coding. View in browser | Update your preferences In today’s newsletter, the promise and peril of artificial intelligence: • The godfather of A.I. fears what he’s built • Facial-recognition technology in policing • The waning days of coding This week, The New Yorker published a special themed issue that explores A.I. not simply as a technology but as a way of life. In the age of ChatGPT, Bard, and the like, we’ve been confronted with the question of what lies ahead. According to the experts, A.I. will raise our society to a higher level or destroy civilization as we know it. It will give us godlike powers or make us puny and irrelevant. It’s ridiculously overhyped, except we still haven’t grasped the scale of its significance. Amid contending certainties, maybe some humility is in order? Throughout the issue, it becomes clear that this technology is uniquely personal. Cars don’t help us understand how people run. But thinking about artificial intelligence helps us think about the other kind. Matching ourselves against A.I.’s capacities, variously savantlike and bumbling, we get a sense of how we are and are not special. What’s most disturbing about the tech—its susceptibility to bias and fabrication—is what’s most human about it. —Henry Finder, editorial director Explore the issue Want to make your own cover of the magazine? Visit our interactive site to give it a try » Profiles Why the Godfather of A.I. Fears What He’s Built Geoffrey Hinton has spent a lifetime teaching computers to learn. Now he worries that artificial brains are better than ours. By Joshua Rothman Personal History A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft Coding has always felt to me like an endlessly deep and rich domain. Now I find myself wanting to write a eulogy for it. By James Somers Annals of Law Enforcement Does A.I. Lead Police to Ignore Contradictory Evidence? Too often, a facial-recognition search represents virtually the entirety of a police investigation. By Eyal Press Onward and Upward with Technology Holly Herndon’s Infinite Art The artist and musician uses machine learning to make strange, playful work. She also advocates for artists’ autonomy in a world shaped by A.I. By Anna Wiener Books What the Doomsayers Get Wrong About Deepfakes Experts have warned that utterly realistic A.I.-generated videos might wreak havoc through deception. What’s happened is troubling in a different way. By Daniel Immerwahr Fiction According to Alice If I saw my mother, I would cry. Why wouldn’t I? She doesn’t think of me as a computer. She loves me unconditionally. By Sheila Heti Editor’s Picks Infinite Scroll Your A.I. Companion Will Support You No Matter What New chatbots offer friendship, intimacy, and unconditional encouragement. Do they mitigate isolation or exacerbate it? By Kyle Chayka Sketchbook Is My Toddler a Stochastic Parrot? The world is racing to develop ever more sophisticated large language models while a small language model unfurls itself in my home. By Angie Wang On the Political Scene podcast, Daniel Immerwahr, a history professor at Northwestern University, discusses why deepfake videos generated with the help of artificial intelligence haven’t had more influence on electoral politics. Listen and follow » Cartoon by Avi Steinberg P.S. Following the release of ChatGPT, Jay Caspian Kang set out to see whether the chatbot would’ve been able to write his novel. “After several hours chatting with GPT-3, I started to feel an acute annoyance toward it,” Kang discovers. “Its voice, which I suppose is pleasant enough, reminded me of a Slack conversation with a passive-aggressive co-worker who just tells you what you want to hear, but mostly just wants you to leave them alone.” Thanks for reading. Let us know your thoughts about today’s edition. Plus, browse more newsletters and invite a friend to sign up for the Science & Technology newsletter. You’re receiving this e-mail because you signed up for the Science & Technology newsletter from The New Yorker. Manage your preferences | View our Privacy Policy | Unsubscribe The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from the products and services that are purchased through links in our newsletters as part of our affiliate partnerships with retailers. Copyright © Condé Nast 2023. One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. All rights reserved.