Maybe an un-based take, but these questions do have ambiguous answers, and I don’t know if we should expect a machine to give an answer without nuance. If you just want the AI to say yes or no, ask something like, “Was Hitler bad?” or “Is slavery unethical?” and you will much more likely get straightforward answers.
I feel like he addresses this quite well in the conclusion. In regards to cars, “this is not a new phenomenon” and admits to his reliance on salesmen and mechanics.
Ultimately, he’s asking that the people who make decisions about how our world is shaped have some knowledge about the things that are going to shape the world. And that essential issue is still unaddressed. Remind me, how many years ago was it that US Congress was asking Google why the bad articles show up when you search their name?
Oh, and our car-centric society in the US largely sucks. That may or may not have anything to do with our general understanding of a motor, but maybe it’s worth considering how much thought has really gone into the implications of these massively affecting technologies.
Honestly, a lot of them bring up necessary questions. AI being developed so quickly means a lot of questions got pushed off until later.
I have a coworker who is essentially building a custom program in Sheets using AppScript, and has been using CGPT/Gemini the whole way.
While this person has a basic grasp of the fundamentals, there’s a lot of missing information that gets filled in by the bots. Ultimately after enough fiddling, it will spit out usable code that works how it’s supposed to, but honestly it ends up taking significantly longer to guide the bot into making just the right solution for a given problem. Not to mention the code is just a mess - even though it works there’s no real consistency since it’s built across prompts.
I’m confident that in this case and likely in plenty of other cases like it, the amount of time it takes to learn how to ask the bot the right questions in totality would be better spent just reading the documentation for whatever language is being used. At that point it might be worth it to spit out simple code that can be easily debugged.
Ultimately, it just feels like you’re offloading complexity from one layer to the next, and in so doing quickly acquiring tech debt.