Tag Archives: artificial intelligence
Extinction Denied?
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 14th June 2026Two basic events seem to be converging. First, our technology advances at an astonishingly rapid pace, while our behavior hasn’t changed since our ancestors were kicked out of Eden. Thus, we now have the capacity for endless mayhem (I’m ignoring all the benefits of technology, as they can be extinguished in a millisecond), coupled with…
› Read the full entry
Chatting with GPT
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 12th March 2026Many users feed information to their AI of choice and ask it to organize it. I usually do the reverse. I feed it organized data and ask it to source it or verify it. Almost always, I’m asking the machine (usually ChatGPT) questions to which I already know the answer. As the machine speaks or…
› Read the full entry
The Marbled Mind
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 23rd December 2025Divergent analyses of the same information by people of equal insight, intelligence, and goodwill are a constant feature of human interactions. Politics is a prime example of this phenomenon, but they’re so contentious that either side of a political divide is likely to vigorously declare the other a prisoner of error rather than admit the…
› Read the full entry
There’s Little I in AI
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 28th November 2025I previously touched this subject several times; the last piece was a couple of years ago, but its ever-increasing shadow made me think an encore might be appropriate. Everybody is talking or writing about AI, though the level of comprehension about the subject seems inversely proportional to its ubiquity. You certainly won’t get any deep…
› Read the full entry
Adventures in AI
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 19th September 2025I’ve been test driving a couple of AIs over the past few weeks. They’re quite proficient at assembling facts, dates, lists, and other information that would take a human a considerable amount of time to compile. But when it comes to opinions and judgments, it lacks proficiency and wisdom. The latter is tough to encode….
› Read the full entry
A Few Thoughts about Artificial Intelligence
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 12th September 2023AI is on the lips of just about everyone, including those who don’t know what the two letters stand for. Many seem to share the concern of the philosopher Nick Bostrom that we may create AI systems that will be so powerful and so much smarter than we are that they will take over the…
› Read the full entry
Another Failure of AI – Man Beats Best Computer Go Program
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 20th February 2023This is a flow up to the article I wrote here five days ago in which I described the failure of Open AI’s ChatGPT to handle medical material. Obviously, the AI program has not had much exposure to medicine accounting for its poor performance in that field. Specialized AI programs have done as well or…
› Read the full entry
The Perils of AI
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 15th February 2023I’ve recently read several articles describing the incredible output of openai. Samples of its work were presented as equivalent to the columns of newswriters or the advice emails by writers with large numbers of readers. So I decided to try it out. I asked for the biographies of a number of well known and important…
› Read the full entry
Artificial Intelligence is Better Than No Intelligence at All
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 28th June 2022The press has covered the release by a Google engineer that the company has an AI that is sentient with a mix of fear, fascination, and foreboding. For the purposes of this article I will assume that everything Blake Lemoine (the Google engineer) has said about LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) is true. If…
› Read the full entry
Bring Back The Abacus
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 5th July 2018The complete ingestion of the modern world by the computer has putatively made life easier and allegedly added to the variety and plenty of life’s pleasant experiences. Except when it hasn’t. Yesterday Walgreens informed me that I had a prescription ready for pickup. To make life easier for me they gave me a link to…
› Read the full entry
