Scott Dewing

Proliferating AI is overloading our already overloaded power grids that are now buckling beneath skyrocketing computational demands to process all those bits and bytes so that we can have AI-generated pictures of Donald Trump hugging a kitten or riding astride a majestic lion as well as entirely AI-generated short films with thoughtful titles like Broccoligeddon and Drinking Gasoline.

Many of today’s most popular generative AI systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude still utilize WIMP for interaction with users typing prompts into a GUI. But that’s rapidly being replaced by humans interacting with AI systems using spoken language.

That goes for me too. Maybe especially for me. I’ve done my fair share of freaking out about AI both in conversations with friends and colleagues as well as right here, in writing, in past columns. Perhaps saying “freaking out” is a bit hyperbolic, but let’s roll with that.

According to Google, its latest quantum computing chip, Willow, is capable of solving a complex computation problem in just 5 minutes that would take the world’s fastest supercomputer 10 septillion years to solve.

As a technologist, I cannot help but see the world through the lenses I’ve crafted over years of reading, writing, and thinking about technology and its impacts on society, culture, and humanity. I’ll be the first to admit that this can taint one’s view of the world. Sometimes it can lead to insights, other times to myopia.

As AI increasingly permeates all facets of modern life, we will be bombarded with new challenges at the same time we’re reeling from the challenges that have resulted from widespread adoption of smartphones and the proliferation of social media and online gaming that have, collectively, handicapped our youth.

It’s another presidential election year and a reminder that our country still doesn’t have a secure, nationwide e-voting system even following all the turmoil of the 2020 election. We have developed all the technologies we need in order to achieve this―data encryption, two-factor and biometric authentication, smartphones, smart cards, cloud computing, high-speed fiber optic connectivity―and yet here we are, four years later, with the same system.

Once upon a time, a blue planet orbited a white sun at 67,000 mph in a small solar system located at the edge of a large galaxy hurtling through the vastness of the universe’s mostly empty space at 1.3 million mph. The blue planet was billions of years old and had become home to millions of species of plants and animals that had originated and evolved out of the cosmic chaos of a long-ago exploded star. One of the animals on the blue planet eventually evolved to become a hyper-intelligent being that invented language and began naming things. This animal named itself Homo sapiens (“wise man”) and called the blue planet “Earth” and the galaxy it was in “The Milky Way”.

The year 2023 might be the last year I write this column.

We’ve become obsessed with tracking everything. Maybe not all of us, but most of us likely track at least one or more of the following: steps per day, body weight, caloric intake, exercise routine, hours worked, sleep.

The future possibilities for our species significantly changed on Monday, July 16th 1945 at precisely 5:30 a.m. At that moment, the landscape of New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto desert was engulfed by a flash of beautiful light brighter than a dozen suns.