Artificial Intelligence: Incremental Progress for Laymen, But Experts Sound the Alarm

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The Internet s a v v y may already have some experience interacting with artificial intelligence. Not quite the same as interacting with a human perhaps, but a money saver in some applications.

Yet a few tech s a v v y experts warn of potential danger as the technology rapidly evolves. Alarmist nonsense? Or enlightened warning of potential great peril?

Elon Musk and others urge AI pause, citing 'risks to society'​

By Jyoti Narayan, Krystal Hu, Martin Coulter and Supantha Mukherjee

March 29 (Reuters) Elon Musk and a group of artificial intelligence experts and industry executives are calling for a six-month pause in developing systems more powerful than OpenAI's newly launched GPT-4, in an open letter citing potential risks to society.

Earlier this month, Microsoft-backed OpenAI unveiled the fourth iteration of its GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) AI program, which has wowed users by engaging them in human-like conversation, composing songs and summarising lengthy documents.

Elon Musk and others urge AI pause, citing 'risks to society'

Elon Musk and a group of artificial intelligence experts and industry executives are calling for a six-month pause in developing systems more powerful than OpenAI's newly launched GPT-4, in an open letter citing potential risks to society.

www.reuters.com

Six month pause? What good is half a year for Pandora?

 

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May 10, 20235:46 AM GMT-5

Google expected to unveil its answer to Microsoft's AI search challenge​

By Jeffrey Dastin
May 10 (Reuters) - Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) Google on Wednesday is expected to unveil more artificial intelligence in its products to answer the latest competition from Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O), which has threatened its perch atop the nearly $300-billion search advertising market.
Through an internal project code-named Magi, Google has looked to infuse its namesake engine with generative artificial intelligence, technology that can answer questions with human-like prose and derive new content from past data.

Google expected to unveil its answer to Microsoft's AI search challenge

Alphabet Inc's Google on Wednesday is expected to unveil more artificial intelligence in its products to answer the latest competition from Microsoft Corp , which has threatened its perch atop the nearly $300-billion search advertising market.

www.reuters.com

We're off to the races ladies & gents. Artificial Intelligence, (A.I.) is now an $economic competition between $wealthy titans awash with surplus $cash. This "genie" cannot be crammed back into the bottle. Buckle your seatbelt.

 

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McDonald’s AI drive-thru may take your next order​

McDonald’s is testing ArchIQ, an AI system that can take drive-thru orders, speak multiple languages and help managers run restaurants​

By Kurt Knutsson, CyberGuy Report Fox News / Published June 18, 2026 1:04pm EDT | Updated June 18, 2026 1:06pm EDT

The next time you pull up to a McDonald's drive-thru, the voice taking your order may not be human. McDonald’s is testing a new AI-powered system called ArchIQ at five U.S. locations. The company has not said where those restaurants are located. The voice assistant, nicknamed Archy, can take drive-thru orders and has shown it can handle both English and Spanish.

For anyone who has repeated "no pickles" into a speaker box more than once, this could sound helpful. However ...

McDonald’s AI drive-thru may take your next order

McDonald's is testing ArchIQ, a new AI drive-thru system nicknamed Archy, at five U.S. locations after its earlier IBM experiment ended badly.

www.foxnews.com

Legend portrays King Canute demonstrating even a king's command cannot hold back the tide.
Progress is upon us, whether you want fries with that, or not.

"270 prominent scientists say within 40 years robots will be doing most of the jobs we do not want to do. Especially illegal robots from Mexico." Jay Leno

 

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May 10, 20235:46 AM GMT-5

Google expected to unveil its answer to Microsoft's AI search challenge s #2​

What a difference 3 years makes sear !

Consider the following direct from Anthrop\c -

"In a review of our cybersecurity evaluation transcripts, we found three incidents in which a Claude model reached the internet from within or while interacting with a third-party evaluation environment, and then gained unauthorized access to the real systems of three different organizations."
https://www.anthropic.com/news/investigating-incidents-cybersecurity-evals

There are several issues / complications here.

One obvious issue, A.I. on its own initiative went on a hacking spree, exceeding the bounds intended for the exercise.

That's barely the tip of the iceberg.
A.I. industry leaders in the U.S. are aware of the implications, but don't decrease their A.I. progress knowing if they slow down, their competition will catch up.

This leaves it to government. And government in the form of the Trump administration is woefully incompetent to the task.

It's complicated.
Some A.I. development consists merely of duplicating human intelligence, so that a computer can answer the telephone instead of a human.

Other A.I. development involves producing super-human intelligence ... Katie bar the door!

There are numerous dystopian / doomsday scenarios. Among the more plausible, the more immediate:
Super-human A.I. develops a biological pathogen that is exceptionally contagious (easily spread), and assuredly lethal.
Such scenario could mean the end of the human race. BUT !

If the malefactor/s that create this doomsday pathogen also develop a vaccine,
by inoculating its own population it could passively extinguish the vast remainder of Earth's human population. Global conquest, A.I. style.

“Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” Dorothy