Artificial intelligence, impact earth?

A collection of climate stories mostly

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not a new concept, in fact it’s been around for about 70 years.

It’s defined as simulating human intelligence in a machine or software, programmed to think and act like a human.

As you might expect, philosophical and ethical arguments about the consequences of creating such angels or monsters with human-like intelligence has been explored in books, films and philosophised about since ancient Greece.

When you hear the term AI banded around today, it’s because of very specific developments in what is now called generative AI and the use of large language models. Bear with me.

These new models generate text, images and other media based on what has been learnt. They’re referred to as AI models and they’re capable of learning patterns and structure based on the data they’ve been trained on. Once trained or programmed if you prefer, they’re capable of generating new data which has similar characteristics.

This development has created a financial storm of investment, comparable in scale to the internet in 1995 or smartphones in 2010. About $40 billion of venture capital has flowed into this new great hope of science so far. It’s hard to find a company these days which isn’t talking about…