• Ignorance is not bliss for ChatGPT | Letters

    Ignorance is not bliss for ChatGPT | Letters
    Geoff Renshaw has realised that the chatbot can’t say ‘I don’t know’, Tom Brown thinks it has been reading too much KafkaFrom Elif Batuman’s experience with ChatGPT, it seems that artificial intelligence possesses one very human characteristic: a deep reluctance to confess to ignorance (Proust, ChatGPT and the case of the forgotten quote, 5 September).Many, many times I have found that instead of simply and candidly replying “I don’t know” to my qu
  • The Handover by David Runciman review – is the future out of our control?

    The Handover by David Runciman review – is the future out of our control?
    Surveying everything from hunter gatherers to Elon Musk, the Cambridge politics professor debates whether our fate is sealed by the machines we’ve createdBack in 2016, a month before the EU referendum, I went along to the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford to interview its director, the Swedish-born philosopher Nick Bostrom, who had just written a book called Superintelligence. The book outlined the existential risk to democracy and humanity implied by advances in machine learning. Bos