On October 11th join our Generative AI Panel Discussion with Ron Smith, Bernhard Suhm, and Marv Goldschmitt.

On October 11th the speakers who met with in September have been invited back for an open conversation with us. I hope that you will come prepared to discuss your thoughts on the advances in AI as well as the challenges that confront people all over the planet.

In my experience, technologists have been historically reluctant to become involved in public policy and yet in our technologically intense world the absence of technological input is a concern to me. I saw a recent article in the New York Times by writer James Pogue about Senator Chris Murphy. Pogue wrote “... the idea that modern life is a story of constant economic and technological progress steadily making the world a better place has stopped lining up with how Americans feel.” Senator Murphy (D-Conn) and Governor Spencer Cox (R-Utah) have launched a national conversation with the intent to restore the common good. They look to involving intellectuals and activists. Notably, technologists do not seem to be included in their thinking. Maybe they were not considered/invited. In any case, we need to become part of the conversation.

There is a lot of good that has come from technology in health care, for example, and more to come. But I am equally certain that technology can be and is being used abusively. The misinformation and disinformation that appear in social media are examples. The changes in AI that began in November 2022 with Generative AI are remarkable. GenAI is not any new technology. This one is shattering. But I suppose that to the average thoughtful person, the telephone must have been shattering. Just as the Model T. What is different is the case of GenAI is that it does not just add a new dimension to our lives, it presents technology as a force beyond nature. It allegedly thinks and feels though it is not clear on what scale and in what detail it compares to human thinking. But we don’t really understand the particulars of how humans think. I worry that technology may be heading so far out front of humans that people may begin to distrust science and technology on a level that is unprecedented today. That would be disaster from my perspective.

Technology and technologists have crucial roles to play in my view in medicine, meeting energy demand, addressing climate change, k-12 education (which has been on my radar screen for decades) and so much more. My hope is that we have learned some lessons from the history of the Internet and The Web that may help lead to a responsible and accountable advance of AI into our social fabric. My sense, however, is that GenAI has the potential to be supremely useful and also supremely abusive (personal, socially, culturally) and the tech giants who are moving it at breakneck speed are driven by age old motivation...fear (of losing market share) and greed (fear of losing market share) rather than societal benefit.