A.I. — Living (and Chatting) With Intelligent Machines

Launched in November 2022, the ChatGPT app had became, by the following January, the fastest-growing consumer software application in history. Since then, the floodgates of interest in and use of forms of “artificial intelligence” seem to have opened in business, technology, medicine, and everyday life.

What is A.I.? What’s an “intelligent machine?” And “machine learning”? What’s real and what’s (thus far) mostly hype?What has already changed in global science, commerce, and society? What’s likely (or possible) to come next?

Why are some experts so unruffled? Why are others so worried? What questions should we be asking?

Artificial Intelligence is today’s story. It is the Second Coming and the Apocalypse at the same time. It demands nothing less than a searching re-examination of mind, thought, intelligence, ethics, and what it means to be human.