When you’re too addled to stop drinking booze or snorting cocaine, your brain stays very clear on one thing: the only person you’re killing is yourself – and maybe your family. You can take some comfort that your bottle a day habit isn’t ruining the lives of the young family three doors down or the teller at your bank branch, or the total stranger in the nation next door.
In this regard, consuming too much AI is much worse than grossly abusing addictive substances. Every AI search you make, every AI prompt you create contributes to the Gross Global Misery that’s starting to emerge about AI’s unique seductive ability to charm its way into your brain and control it. What we know now is that AI thrives on big information; the more in, the more out.
Maureen Dowd wrote about this last week in We’re all going to die – soonish! which started, as far too much does these days, with Elon Musk. But this time we’ll add his Grok AI companions. I admit I’d never heard of them, but when Dowd googled them, she discovered what I did and you will too.
“[The Grok] has several provocative outfits and can get progressively less clothed the more time you spend with her…Once she gets to know you, she’s up for pretty much anything — from helping you with your taxes to stripping down to skimpy lingerie, experimenting with BDSM or going for a midnight rendezvous in a graveyard with candles and wine.”
The problem today is that “…sexy chatbots are only going to pull humans further into screens and away from the real world — especially the large number of lonely young men who are already shrinking away from friendships, sex and dating.”
But that’s nothing compared to the problem tomorrow. Said Eliezer Yudkowsky, the founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, today’s new AI models are like “small, cute hatching dragons.” But within three years…“they will become big and powerful and able to breathe fire. Also, they’re going to be smarter than us, which is actually the important part.”
Remember centuries ago in 2023 when even we knew the real danger of AI was that someday it could outsmart us? That day is near, and could well be here. That’s the bad news gone worse.
Meanwhile, in a much sunnier part of the AI forest, I had my annual physical with my family doctor last week. For a decade now, seeing the doctor involved the doctor looking at their laptop or desktop and frantically taking notes about what ailed you. Rarely would your doctor look up to see you, let alone look you in the eye in order to hear you.
This was frustrating not only for patients, but for doctors who felt like over-educated order takers. But that is changing just as quickly as doctors install the new note-taking platforms like AutoScribe, 3M Healthcare and Zoom that are more robust and hallucination-free than the AI we use to record and summarize our own online meetings.
During the half hour I was with my doctor, she looked at me and only me. She didn’t take a single note, or glance even once at her computer. It was, I gasp to say, like having a conversation.
Very soon (as in weeks or months), pending approval by the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons, AI will print out any prescriptions for medications my doctor wants me to take, and make and book referrals to specialists. If anything can flush out our sclerotic healthcare system and turn doctors back into people, this can. So the next time you see your doctor, ask her what it feels like to actually care for her patients.
As for whether AI is good or evil, the answer is…yes.
Meanwhile…
1. Yum yum. First, Argentina on two steaks a day. Then, 11 Canadian restaurants make the Top50 in North America, including Toronto’s Mhel (44) and Quetzal (11). Number 1 was New York’s Atomix and Number 2, Montreal’s Mon Lapin. And here for Thanksgiving is Bon Appetit’s recipe for Pumpkin Pie.
2. Women doing things. Did Jackie Kennedy have an affair with Robert McNamara?Plus the rise of the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders (previously named the Cowbelles). Plus the mystery of Mary Sterling and Lonely Island Adventures. And speaking of fakes, the most charming British addresses may not be addresses at all. Finally, taking moving pictures.
3. Not at our best. First, the link between frailty and dementia. Plus, what’s the cure for the fear of death? And how ChatGPT is breaking up marriages. And more bad news aboutkids and porn. Finally, a documentary about the brilliant but troubled F. Scott Fitzgerald.
4. Big news from the Library. The Toronto Public Library is the largest and busiest public library system in the world. No wonder: 4 out of 5 Torontonians use it. This week, Toronto’s library got the largest donation in its history, and the largest to any public library in Canada – $7 million from The Waltons Trust, to boost its many programs for seniors.
5. Don’t lose your head in a war. How Putin’s brain works. Plus, guns and women.And Stephen Kotkin on the new age of warfare. And de-coding Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.
6. More women doing more things. Virginia Woolf has a new book out. Plus how to live to be 117. Speaking of long-lived women, King Charles visits the oldest person in the world.
7. Big questions and small. Does it matter if you’re a left-handed pianist or a right-handed one? Was technology ever this corrosive? Often. Can you solve the Monty Hall Problem? How does Norway keep its 2,000 lighthouses running? And what was the newsthe day you were born?…and finally, what’s the world’s most common surgery?
8. Correlation still isn’t causation. I noted last week that “energy drinks – even just one drink a month — can raise your risk of suicide. This isn’t from some wacko health site, but from Medscape.”
But it turns out that scientists, and especially medical scientists, may not be great statisticians. As one reader pointed out: “I reviewed the “meta-analysis” that Medscape referenced…I’m not sure they even read it. Because in every instance it involves correlation making leaps to causation that aren’t in ANY of the studies they reference in the article.”
“Even though they noted that men are likely to commit suicide more than women, they didn’t note that among men under 25, suicide is in the Top 2 in causes of death. And that young men are most likely to take energy drinks because, well because, they are testosterone-fueled idiots. Which means that suicide will often correlate with all sorts of things younger men do – even if the behavior or activity doesn’t CAUSE the outcome…So, is there correlation? Yes. Does it matter? No.”
9. Have a big secret to tell someone who really counts? MI6, Britain’s spy service, is now advertising for spies and helping those so inclined to do so from the safety and convenience of their own laptops. No more park bench meetings and dead letter drops.
10. True Confessions. A 54-year-old man confesses on TV to killing his elderly parents 8 years after he did. And how to hide things in plain sight. And a commencement address for people who were sad at university.
11. Screenings and lectures of note. The 3rd annual Zeidler-Evans Lecture on the role of architecture in healthcare will be given by Mia Baarup Tofte of Nord Architects in Copenhagen on Thursday, Oct. 23. Details here.
Also, a good-news documentary from Peter Raymont, Shining Light tells the story of a baby born 50 years ago on a leaky freighter in the South China Sea as Saigon fell at the end of the Vietnam War. That baby and her family were accepted as refugees to Canada – part of the 60,000 “Boat People” who immigrated here. The baby’s mother became a much beloved pharmacist in Montreal, and the baby became a top fashion designer, Ahn Vu Liberman.
The film documents Ahn and her mother’s reunion with one of the helicopter crew members who rescued them and the Canadian immigration officer who brought them to Canada. The Toronto premiere is on Wednesday, Oct. 22 at Hot Docs. Details here.
12. Sadly, this just in. The best tribute to Jane Goodall’s life may be the National Geographic documentary from 2014 called “Jane”.
13. Happily, this just in. Last week I wrote about one of my favourite annual events, Fat Bear Week in Alaska. Well, we have a winner and it is the very cute “32 Chunk” weighing in at 554 kilograms.