"HAL, beef up my resume." "That I can do, Bill."
Thomas Friedman takes acclaim for AI to the nth degree of unintentional comedy.
In a column the other day, the Times writer Thomas Friedman says he suffered a sleepless night after having his mind blown right out of his head by a product demo of some advanced artificial intelligence, in this case GPT-4, the most advanced version of the chatbot ChatGPT. I meant yet another product demo. For months now, promoters of this technology have been telling credulous journalists and other public-intellectual types that it represents an epoch on the level of the invention of the wheel, or at least the printing press.
Craig Mundie, however, scoffs at such low-bar comparisons. Friedman quotes the former chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft, who gave him the tour:
“You need to understand,” Craig warned [sic] me before he started his demo, “this is going to change everything about how we do everything. I think that it represents mankind’s greatest invention to date.
What Friedman loses in being late to the party he can thus make up for by the totality of his gobsmackedness. He’ll always be able to claim that, even if he had to play some catchup, nobody fell harder for this line of gab than he. Maybe he’s never fallen quite this hard for any other line of gab. Given his position twenty years ago on the U.S. invasion of Iraq, that would be saying something.
Craig Mundie’s “warning” is all-too obviously the same warning the dealer gives you regarding potency—all-too obvious, that is, to anyone but Friedman. The columnist was clearly pre-sold on believing that AI places us in what he calls a “Promethean moment.” Columns need moments. Telling us we’re in a Promethean one has been going on since Prometheus. What makes his particular column notable is the lameness of the example Friedman chooses to offer us of what GPT-4 can so supposedly world-changingly do.
Friedman was knocked out by the invention’s supposedly paradigm-breaking creative facility with language, a phenomenon that’s supposed to distinguish human beings from other life forms. To knock us, in turn, out, he starts slowly and builds toward a big reveal.