There's NO brakes !!

         The other night I tuned into a BBC interview with the USA co-founder of Anthropic (currently about the biggest AI developing company) Jack Clark. These questions just about made my head explode with the need to know.... and NOW. Which is why I've given it a few days to become rational again.

What was Jack Clark's BBC comment on AI re the brake pedal?

        "You want the option to be able to take your foot off the gas and put your foot on the brake. Right now it's like the AI industry has a gas pedal, but it doesn't have a brake pedal."

        This stems from the fact, so he said, that a heap of AI code writing at the moment is actually done by AI itself, that is, a certain amount of AI new code is being self generated!! Without having first installed proper controlling measures. Hence Clark's "no brakes" analogy. It's like (as I see it) inventing an extremely high powered truck, setting it going on the freeway, with the accelerator (okay, the gas pedal) in place, but without having quite finished the steering, and yet to invent the brakes.

        The BBC article about it goes on to say - "Already, Anthropic's chatbot Claude (wonderfully benign name eh?) is operating on code of which 80% of the system wrote itself. Getting to 100% is possible withing 2 years, Clark said, and would have huge implications. Yet Anthropic this week welcomed an executive order on AI from US President Donald Trump that was relatively hands off in its directives towards the companies. It did not require AI companies to submit to safety testing by the government, something that remains a voluntary effort."

        So, once again, when it comes to big bucks, the fox has been put in charge of the hen-house??

        Not sure about you, but none of the above makes me relaxed. But here's the rub. (The hypocrisy?). I use AI regularly to answer these sorts of questions. And yesterday I needed a key word for my daily paper's Brainbreaker code puzzle, so I asked Google for...

"A six letter word ending in QUE where the second letter is a consonant". 

...because I couldn't find the years needed to go through my Collins dictionary till I found one. It was "opaque" - code broken, puzzle done, but me feeling just a tiny bit disappointed in myself and pissed off that I couldn't think of it without help. But I said - This is the good use of AI. Saved me years of searching. Nup, I still had that hollow feeling.

        So, what's this all mean? Stuffed if I know. Will AI be my servant or my master??

            Trev

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