AI models

Trump is treating AI like a nuclear bomb

Initially, AI’s critics insisted that artificial intelligence was just another software product. AI was presented as a huge commercial opportunity, sure. It was presented as a tool through which humans could enhance their lives, but ultimately it was still understood as a statistical program that knew how to spell. Thanks to the Trump administration’s Anthropic export ban, that illusion is dead. The more powerful the technology becomes, the more determined governments are to control who can access it The United States government ordered Anthropic to suspend access for non-US persons to Fable and Mythos 5, its most advanced models, after officials raised national-security concerns. Whatever one thinks of the decision itself, its significance is hard to overstate.

AI is both liberating and enslaving us

Elaine Herzberg was pushing a bicycle laden with shopping across a busy road in Tempe, Arizona in 2018 when she was struck by a hybrid electric Volvo SUV at 40mph. At the time of the accident, the woman in the driver’s seat was watching a talent show on her phone. The SUV had been fitted with an autonomous driving system consisting of neural networks that integrated image recognisers. The reason Herzberg died was because what she was doing did not compute. The autonomous driving system recalibrated the car’s trajectory to avoid the bicycle, which it took to be travelling along the road, only to collide with Herzberg, who was walking across it. She became the first casualty of artificial intelligence.