The Future Of Artificial Intelligence

Why it’s not going to be ever-better ChatGPT

Allan Milne Lees
8 min readSep 20, 2024
Image credit: History Hit

We humans love a good sensation. Whether it’s an airplane crash, a mass shooting in a school, or some halfwit dictator ordering the invasion of a neighboring nation, we simply can’t resist the impulse to stop and gawp, enraptured by the sensationalism of it all. Naturally, so-called “news” organizations exploit this hardwired impulse in order to generate buckets of revenue.

Most recently, artificial intelligence (AI) of the GPT form has captured the hearts and minds of journalists and editors around the world. Here’s something that can be presented in a wide variety of ways from “nearly human” to “superhuman” and from boon to bane. According to many breathless commentaries, AI will either destroy every job in existence and then wipe humans from the face of the Earth or will unleash untold new creative opportunities and rescue us from our perpetual self-harming folly.

In reality, of course, neither will occur.

While ChatGPT-style AI has been in vogue recently, it’s basically nothing more than a statistical engine that relies on pre-existing human-created content in order to generate seemingly human outputs. Although a generation of idle school children and nearly as idle white-collar drones are enamored of the technology because it…

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Allan Milne Lees

Anyone who enjoys my articles here on Medium may be interested in my books Why Democracy Failed and The Praying Ape, both available from Amazon.