Category: Artificial Intelligence

An insightful article by Bruce Schneier on how humans have built guardrails to manage mistakes made by humans. But we are not equipped to manage the weird mistakes made by AI.

Humanity is now rapidly integrating a wholly different kind of mistake-maker into society: AI. Technologies like large language models (LLMs) can perform many cognitive tasks traditionally fulfilled by humans, but they make plenty of mistakes. It seems ridiculous when chatbots tell you to eat rocks or add glue to pizza. But it’s not the frequency or severity of AI systems’ mistakes that differentiates them from human mistakes. It’s their weirdness. AI systems do not make mistakes in the same ways that humans do.

Much of the friction—and risk—associated with our use of AI arise from that difference. We need to invent new security systems that adapt to these differences and prevent harm from AI mistakes.

Gary Marcus on AI Agents

I do genuinely think we will all have our own AI agents, and companies will have armies of them. And they will be worth trillions, since eventually (no time soon) they will do a huge fraction of all human knowledge work, and maybe physical labor too. 

But not this year (or next, or the one after that, and probably not this decade, except in narrow use cases). All that we will have this year are demos.

Funny.

And I am hoping it plays out the way Gary is describing it. I get to keep my job a little longer. And build a retirement corpus.