RAND Says AI Apocalypse Unlikely

 

In 2024, several hundred artificial-intelligence (AI) researchers signed a statement calling for serious actions to avert the possibility that AI could break bad and kill the human race.  In an interview last February, Elon Musk mused that there is "only" a 20% chance of annihilation from AI.  With so many prominent people speculating that AI may spell the end of humanity, Michael J. D. Vermeer of the RAND Corporation began a project to explore just how AI could wipe out all humans.  It's not as easy as you think.

 

RAND is one of the original think tanks, founded in 1948 to develop U. S. military policies, and has since studied a wide range of issues in quantitative ways.  As Vermeer writes in the September Scientific American, he and his fellow researchers considered three main approaches to the extinction problem:  (1) nuclear weapons, (2) pandemics, and (3) deliberately-induced global warming. 

 

It turns out that nuclear weapons, although capable of killing billions if set off in densely-populated areas, would not do the job.  There would be little remnants of people scattered in remote places, and they would probably be enough to reconstitute human life indefinitely.

 

The most likely scenario that would work is a combination of pathogens that together would kill nearly every human who caught them.  The problem here ("problem" from AI's point of view) is that once people figured out what was going on, they would invoke quarantines, much as New Zealand did during COVID, and entire island nations or other isolated regions could survive until the pandemic burned itself out.

 

Artificially-induced global warming was the hardest way to do it.  There are compounds such as sulfur hexafluoride which have about 25,000 times the global-warming capability of carbon dioxide.  And if you made a few million tons of that and spread it around, it could raise the global average temperature so much that "there would be no environmental niche left for humanity."  But factories pumping megatons of bad stuff into the atmosphere would be hard to hide from people, who naturally would want to know what's going on.

 

So while an AI apocalypse is theoretically possible, all the scenarios they considered had common flaws.  In order for any of them to happen, the AI system would first have to make up its mind, so to speak, to persist in the goal of wiping out humanity until the job was actually done.  Then it would have to wrest control of the relevant technology (nuclear or biological weapons, chemical plants) and conduct extensive projects with them to execute the goal.  It would also have to obtain the cooperation of humans, or at least their unwitting participation.  And finally, as civilization collapsed, the AI system would have to carry on without human help, as the few remaining humans would be useless for AI's purposes and simply targets for extinction.

 

While this is an admirable and objectively scientific study, I think it overlooks a few things. 

 

First, it draws an arbitrary line between the AI system (which in practice would be a conglomeration of systems) and human beings.  Both now and in the foreseeable future, humans will be an essential part of AI because it needs us.  Let's imagine the opposite scenario:  how would humans wipe out all AI from the planet?  If every IT person in the world just didn't show up for work tomorrow, what would happen?  A lot of bad things, certainly, because computers (not just AI, but increasingly systems involving AI) are intimately woven into modern economies.  Nevertheless, I think issues (caused by stupid non-IT humans, probably) would start showing up, and in a short time we would have a global computer crash the likes of which have never been seen.  True, millions of people would die along with the AI systems.  But I'm not aware of any truly autonomous AI system of any complexity and importance that has no humans dealing with it in any way, as apparently was the case in the 1970 sci-fi film "Colossus:  The Forbin Project."

 

So if an AI-powered system showed signs of getting out of hand—taking over control of nuclear weapons, doing back-room pathogen experiments on its own, etc.—we could kill it by just walking away from it, at least the way things are now.

 

More likely than any of the hypothetical disasters imagined by the RAND folks is a possibility they didn't seem to consider.  What if AI just gradually supplants humans until the last human dies?  This is essentially the stated goal of many transhumanists, who foresee the uploading of human consciousness into computer hardware as their equivalent of eternal life.  They don't realize that their idea is equivalent to thinking that making an animated effigy of myself will guarantee my survival after death, much as the ancient Egyptians prepared their pharaohs for the afterlife. 

 

But pernicious ideas like this can gain traction, and we are already seeing an unexpected downturn in fertility worldwide as civilizations benefit from technology-powered prosperity.  If AI, and its auxiliary technological forms, ever puts an end to humanity, I think the gradual, slow replacement of humans by AI-powered systems is more likely than any sudden, concentrated catastrophe, like the ones the RAND people considered.  And the creepy thing about this one is that it's happening already, right now, every day.

 

Romano Guardini was a theologian and philosopher who in 1956 wrote The End of the Modern World, in which he foresaw in broad terms what was going to happen to modernity as the last vestiges of Christian influence were replaced by a focus on the achievement of power for power's sake alone.  Here are a few quotes from near the end of the book:  "The family is losing its significance as an integrating, order-preserving factor . . . . The modern state . . . is losing its organic structure, becoming more and more a complex of all-controlling functions.  In it the human being steps back, the apparatus forward."  As Guardini saw it, the only power rightly controlled is exercised under God.  And once God is abolished and man sets up technology as an idol, looking to it for salvation, the spiritual death of humanity is assured, and physical death may not be far behind.

 

I'm glad we don't have to worry about an AI apocalypse that would make a good, fast, dramatic movie, as the RAND people assure us won't happen.  But there are other dangers from AI, and the slow insidious attack is the one to guard against most vigilantly.

 

Sources:  Michael J. D. Vermeer's "Could AI Really Kill Off Humans?" appeared on pp. 73-74 of the September 2025 issue of Scientific American, and is also available online at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-ai-really-kill-off-humans/.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on sulfur hexafluoride.  The Romano Guardini quotes are from pp. 161-162 of his The End of the Modern World, in an edition published by ISI Press in 1998. 

Is the Internet Emulsifying Society?

 

About a year ago I had cataract surgery, which these days means replacing the natural lens in the eye with an artificial one.  Curious about what happens to the old lens, I looked up the details of the process.  It turns out that one of the most common procedures uses an ultrasonic probe to emulsify the old lens, turning a highly structured and durable object that served me well for 70 years into a liquefied mess that was easily removed. 

 

If you're wondering what this has to do with the internet and society, be patient.

 

A recent report in The Dispatch by Yascha Mounk describes the results of an analysis by Financial Times journalist John Burn-Murdoch of data from a large Understanding America survey of more than 14,000 respondents.  Psychologists have standardized certain personality traits as being fairly easy to assess in surveys and also predictive of how well people do in society.  Among these traits are conscientiousness, extraversion, and neuroticism.  People who are conscientious make good citizens and employees:  they are "organized, responsible, and hardworking."  Extraversion makes for better social skills and community involvement, while neuroticism indicates a trend toward anxiety and depression.

 

Burn-Murdoch divided up the results by age categories, with the youngest being 16 to 39, and compared the rates of these traits to what prevailed in the full population in 2014, less than ten years ago.  The results are shocking.

 

Everybody (16-39, 40-59, and 60+) has declined in extraversion from the 50th to the 40th percentile, although by only ten percentile points out of 100.  (If a number is unchanged from 2014, the results would be 50th percentile today).  But in neuroticism, those under 40, who were already in the 60th percentile in 2014, have now zoomed up to the 70th.  Lots of young neurotics out there.  And they have distinguished themselves even more in the categories of agreeableness (declining from 45 to 35) and most of all, in conscientiousness.  From a relatively good 47th percentile or so in 2014, the younger set have plummeted to an abysmal 28th percentile of conscientiousness in less than a decade.

 

When the results of conscientiousness are broken down into their constituent parts, it gets even worse.  Starting about 2016, the 16-39 group shows jumps in positive responses to "is easily distracted" and "can be careless." 

 

If the survey was restricted to teenagers, you would expect such results, although not necessarily this big.  But we're talking about people in their prime earning years too, twenty- to forty-year-olds. 

 

Mounk ascribes most of these disastrous changes to influences traceable to the Internet, and specifically, social media.  He contrasts the ballyhoo and wild optimism that greeted various Internet-based developments such as online dating and worldwide free phone and Zoom calls with the reality of cyberbullying, trolling, cancel culture, and the mob psychology on steroids that the Internet provides fertile soil for. 

 

Now for the emulsion part.  An emulsion takes something that tends to keep its integrity—such as a blob of oil in water or the natural lens of an eye—and breaks it up into individual pieces that are surrounded by a foreign agent.  In the case of mayonnaise, the oil used is separated into tiny drops surrounded by water.  Oil doesn't naturally mix with water, but when an emulsifier is used (the lecithin in egg yolk, in this case), it reduces surface tension and breaks up the oil into tiny droplets.

 

That's fine in the case of mayonnaise.  But in the case of a society, surrounding each individual with a foreign film of Internet-mediated software that passes through firms interested not primarily in the good of society, but in making a profit, all kinds of pernicious effects can happen.

 

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with making money, so this is not a diatribe against big tech as such.  But in the case of cigarettes, when a popular habit that made the tobacco companies rich was shown to have hidden dangers, it took a lot of political will and persistence to change things so that at least the dangers were known to anyone who picks up a pack of cigarettes.

 

Mounk thinks it may be too late to do much about the social and psychological harms caused by the Internet, but we are still at the early stage of adoption when it comes to generative artificial intelligence (AI).  I tend not to make such a sharp distinction between the way the Internet is currently used and what difference the widespread deployment of free software such as chatGPT will make.  For decades, the tech companies have been using what amounts to AI systems to addict people to their social media services and to profit from political polarization.  So as AI becomes more commonplace it will be a change only in degree, not necessarily in kind.

 

AI or no, we have had plenty of time already to see the pernicious results among young people of interacting with other humans mainly through the mediation of mobile phones.  It's not good.  Just as man does not live by bread alone, people aren't intended to interact by smartphone alone.  If they do, they get less conscientious, more neurotic, more isolated and lonely, and more easily distracted and error-prone.  They also find it increasingly difficult to follow any line of reasoning of more than one step.

 

Several states have recently passed laws restricting the use of smartphones in K-12 education.  This is a controversial but ultimately beneficial step in the right direction, although it will take a while to see how seriously individual school districts take it and whether it makes much of a difference in how young people think and act.  For those of you who believe in the devil, I'm pretty sure he is delighted to see that society is breaking up into isolated individuals who can communicate only through the foreign agent of the Internet, rather than being fully present—physically, emotionally, and spiritually—to the Other. 

 

Perhaps warnings like these will help us realize how bad things have become, and what we need to do to stop them from getting any worse.  In the meantime, enjoy your mayonnaise.

 

Sources:  John Burn-Murdoch's article "How We Got the Internet All Wrong" appeared in The Dispatch on Aug. 12, 2025 at https://thedispatch.com/article/social-media-children-dating-neurotic/.  I also referred to the survey on which it was based at https://uasdata.usc.edu/index.php. 

"Winter's Tale" and the Spirit of Engineering

 

Once in a great while I will review a non-fiction book in this space that I think is worth paying attention to if one is interested in engineering ethics.  Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin is a novel, published in 1983, and even now I can't say exactly why I think it should be more widely known among engineers and those interested in engineering.  But it should be.

 

Every profession has a spirit: a bundle of intuitive and largely emotional feelings that go along with the objective knowledge and actions that constitute the profession.  Among many other things, Winter's Tale captures the spirit of engineering better than any other fiction work I know.  And for that reason alone, it deserves praise.

 

The book is hard to describe.  There are some incontestable facts about it, so I'll start with those.  It is set mainly in New York City, with excursions to an imaginary upstate region called Lake of the Coheeries, and side trips to San Francisco.  It is not a realistic novel, in the sense that some characters in it live longer than normal lifespans, and various other meta-realistic things happen.  There are more characters in it than you'd find in a typical nineteenth-century Russian novel.  There is no single plot, but instead a complex tapestry that dashes back and forth in time like a squirrel crossing a street. 

 

But all these matters are secondary.  The novel's chief virtue is the creation of an atmosphere of hope and, not optimism, exactly—some truly terrible things happen to people in it—but a temperate yet powerful energy and drive shared by nearly all the characters, except for a few completely evil ones.  And even the evil ones are interesting. 

 

The fertility of Helprin's imagination is astounding, as he creates technical terms, flora and fauna, and other things that are, strictly speaking, imaginary yet somehow make sense within the story.  One of the many recurring elements in the book is the appearance of a "cloud wall" which seems to be a kind of matrix of creation and time travel.  Here is how Virginia, one of the principal characters, describes it to her son Martin:

 

           ". . . It swirls around the city in uneven cusps, sometimes dropping down like a tornado to spirit people away or deposit them there, sometimes opening white roads from the city, and sometimes resting out at sea while connections are made with other places.  It is a benevolent storm, a place of refuge, the neutral flow in which we float.  We wonder if there is anything beyond it, and we think that perhaps there is."

           "Why?" Martin asked from within the covers.

            "Because," said Virginia, "in those rare times when all things coalesce to serve beauty, symmetry, and justice, it becomes the color of gold—warm and smiling, as if God were reminded of the perfection and complexity of what He had long ago set to spinning, and long ago forgotten."

 

The whole novel is like that.

 

Although there is no preaching, no doctrine expounded, and very few explicitly religious characters such as ordained ministers, a thread of holiness, or at least awareness of life beyond this one, runs throughout the book.  This is probably why I learned about it from a recommendation by the Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft, who mentioned it in Doors in the Walls of the World.

 

The reason engineers might benefit from reading it is that machines and other engineered structures—steam engines, cranes, bridges, locomotives—and those who design, build, and tend them, are portrayed in a way that is both appealing and transcendent.  At this moment I feel a frustration stemming from my inability to express what is so attractive about this book. 

 

You may learn something from the fact that the reviews of it I could find fell into two camps.  One camp loved it and wished it would go on forever.  The other camp, of which I turned out to be a member, said that after a while they found the book annoying, and almost didn't finish it.  I think one reason for the latter reaction is that structurally, it is all trees and very little forest.

 

The very fertility of Helprin's imagination leads him to introduce novel and fascinating creations, incidents, and characters every page or two, and the result is a loss of coherence in the overall story and sequence of events.  A chart of every character and incident with lines drawn among them would look like the wiring diagram of a Boeing 747. 

 

But every time I said to myself that I was going to stop reading it, I picked it up again, and finally chose one free day to finish the thing, all the time hoping that it would get to the point.  There is no crashing finale in which everything is tied up neatly with a bow.  There is, however, a climax of sorts, and toward the end events occur which have parallels in the New Testament.  Farther than that I shouldn't go, for fear of spoiling the ending for anyone who wants to read it. 

 

The only other novel I can think of that bears even a faint resemblance to Winter's Tale is G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday.  It is also a fantasy in the sense that unrealistic things happen, and it features characters who are what Kreeft calls archetypes, embodied representations of ideas.  Not everyone likes or can even make sense of Chesterton's novel, and the same will undoubtedly be true of Winter's Tale.

 

For a fantasy, Helprin's book is rather earthy in spots, and for that reason I wouldn't recommend it for children.  But the earthiness is not gratuitous, and rounds out the realism of his character portrayals.  Many of the main actors behave courageously and even nobly, and would be good subjects for the exemplary mode of engineering ethics, in which one describes how engineering went right in a particular case with ethical implications. 

 

If you pick up the book, you will know in the first few pages whether you can stand to read the rest.  If you persist till the end, you will have experienced a world unlike our own in some ways, but very like what it could be if we heeded, in Lincoln's phrase, the better angels of our nature. 

 

Sources:  Winter's Tale was published in 1983 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.  Peter Kreeft's Doors in the Walls of the World was published in 2018 by Ignatius Press.

Should We Worry About Teens Befriending AI Companions?

A recent survey-based study by Common Sense Media shows that a substantial minority of teenagers surveyed use AI "companions" for social interaction and relationships.  In a survey of over a thousand young people aged 13 to 17 last April and May, the researchers found that 33% used applications such as ChatGPT, Character, or Replika for things like conversation, role-playing, emotional support, or just as a friend.  Another 43% of those surveyed used AI as a "tool or program," and about a third reported no use of AI at all.

 

Perhaps more troubling than the percentages were some comments made by teens who were interviewed in an Associated Press report on the survey.  An 18-year-old named Ganesh Nair said, "When you're talking to AI, you are always right.  You're always interesting.  You are always emotionally justified."

           

The researchers also found that teens were more sophisticated than you might think about the reliability of AI and the wisdom of using it as a substitute for "meat" friends.  Half of those surveyed said they do not trust advice given to them by AI, although the younger teens tended to be more trusting.  And two-thirds said that their interactions with AI were less satisfying than those with real-life friends, but one-third said they were either about the same or better.  And four out of five teens spend more time with real friends than with AI.

 

The picture that emerges from the survey itself, as opposed to somewhat hyped news reports, is one of curiosity, cautious use, and skepticism.  However, there may be a small number of teens who either turn to AI as a more trusted interlocutor than live friends, or develop unhealthy dependencies of various kinds with AI chatbots. 

 

At present, we are witnessing an uncontrolled experiment in how young people deal with AI companions.  The firms backing these systems with their multibillion-dollar server farms and sophisticated software are motivated to engage young people especially, as habits developed before age 20 or so tend to stay with us for a lifetime.  It's hard to picture a teenager messaging ChatGPT to "grow old along with me," but it may be happening somewhere.

 

I once knew a woman in New England who kept a life-size cloth doll in her house, made to resemble a former husband.  Most people would regard this as a little peculiar.  But what difference is there between that sort of thing and spending time in online chats with a piece of software that simulates a caring and sympathetic friend?  The interaction with AI is more private, at least until somebody hacks the system.  But why does the notion of teenagers who spend time chatting with Character as though it were a real person bother us?

 

By saying "us," I implicitly separate myself from teens who do this sort of thing.  But there are teens who realize the dangers of AI overuse or misuse, and older teens especially expressed concerns to the AP reporter that too much socializing with chatbots could be bad. 

 

The same teen quoted above got "spooked" about AI companions when he learned that a friend of his used his companion to compose a Dear Jill message to his girlfriend of two years when he decided to break up.  I suppose that is not much different than a nineteenth-century swain paging through a tome entitled "Letters for All Occasions," although I doubt that even the Victorians were that thorough in providing examples for the troubled ex-suitor. 

 

Lurking in the background of all this is a very old theological principle:  idolatry.  An idol is anything less than God that we treat as God, in the sense of resorting to it for help instead of God.  For those who don't believe in God, idolatry would seem to be an empty concept.  But even atheists can see the effects of idolatry in extreme cases, even if they don't acknowledge the God who should be worshipped instead of the idol.

 

For a teen in a radically dysfunctional household, turning to an AI companion might be a good alternative, but a kind, loving human being would always be better.  Kind, loving human beings aren't always available, though, and so perhaps an AI companion would suffice in a pinch like a "donut" spare tire until you can get the flat fixed.  But you shouldn't drive on a temporary tire indefinitely, and teens who make AI companions a regular and significant part of their social lives are probably headed for problems.

 

What kind of problems?  Dependency, for one thing.  The AI firms are not promoting their companions out of the kindness of their collective hearts, and the more people rely on their products the more money they make.  The researchers who executed the survey are concerned that teens who use AI companions that never argue, never disagree with them, and validate everything they say, will be ill-prepared for the real world where other humans have their own priorities, interests, and desires. 

 

In an ideal world, every teen would have a loving mother and father they would trust with their deepest concerns, and perhaps friends as well who would give them good advice.  Not many of us grew up in that ideal world, however, and so perhaps teens in really awful situations may find some genuine solace in turning to AI companions rather than humans.

 

The big news of this survey is the fact that use of AI companions among teens is so widespread, though still in the minority.  The next thing to do is to focus on those small numbers of teens for which AI companions are not simply something fun to play with, but form a deep and significant part of their emotional lives.  These are the teens we should be the most concerned about, and finding out why they get so wrapped up with AI companions and what needs the companions satisfy will take us a long way toward understanding this new potential threat to the well-being of teenagers, who are the future of our society.

 

Sources:  The AP article "Teens say they are turning to AI for friendship" appears on the AP website at https://apnews.com/article/ai-companion-generative-teens-mental-health-9ce59a2b250f3bd0187a717ffa2ad21f, and the Common Sense Media survey on which it was based is at https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/research/report/talk-trust-and-trade-offs_2025_web.pdf.

 

The Tea App Data Breach: Not Everybody's Cup Of . . .

 

A phone app called Tea became the No. 1 app downloaded from the U. S. Apple App Store last week.  Then Friday, news came that the app had been hacked, exposing thousands of images and other identifying information online.  The users of Tea are women who want to exchange information about men they are considering as dates, or have dated and want to evaluate for other women.  So any kind of data breach is disturbing, although it could have been worse.

 

Tea, an app introduced in 2023, is exclusively for women, and requires some form of identification to use.  Once a user is logged in, she can either post information about a certain man, or research his background as reported by other users, similar to the popular Yelp app that uses crowdsourcing to rate businesses. 

 

Understandably, some men take a dim view of Tea, and claim it violates their privacy or could even provide grounds for defamation lawsuits.  An attorney named Aaron Minc has been getting "hundreds" of calls from men whose descriptions on Tea are less than complimentary.  In an interview, Minc said Tea users could be sued for spreading false information.  But as the Wikipedia site describing Tea points out, the truth is an absolute defense against such a charge.  Nevertheless, being sued for any reason is not a picnic, and so with data breaches and lawsuits in the air, women may now think twice before signing up for Tea and posting the story of their latest disastrous date, which may have been arranged via social media anyway.

 

You might think most couples meet electronically these days, but a recent survey shows that even among those aged 18-29, only 23% of those who are either married or "in a relationship" met online.  So meeting the old-fashioned eyeball-to-eyeball way is still how most couples get together.  The woman meeting a new guy in person could still use Tea to check out the man's credentials, but that raises larger issues of how reliable the report of another woman would be, especially if the report is anonymous.

 

Lawsuits over relationships are nothing new, of course.  One of the running plot threads that Charles Dickens milked for a lot of laughs in his first published novel, The Pickwick Papers, was how Mr. Pickwick's landlady Mrs. Bardell misunderstood a stray comment he made as a proposal of marriage, and filed a suit against him for breach of promise.  Though the legal details differ, this kind of action pitted the woman against the man, who then had to prove that his intentions were honorable or lose the suit.

 

I will admit that the idea of anonymous women posting ratings on me is somewhat disquieting, but as a teacher at a university, I'm subject to somewhat the same treatment by "Rate the Prof" websites, which take anonymous reports by students of various professors and post them online.  I never look at such sites, and if anything scurrilous has been posted about me, I've remained blissfully unaware of it. 

 

The way Tea works raises the question of whether anonymity online should be as widespread as it is.  That issue has been in the news lately as several states have passed laws requiring robust systems to verify ages for users of pornographic websites, for example.  That is another example where anonymity leads to problems,and positive identification with regard to age can at least mitigate harms to children who are too young to be exposed to porn.

 

Unfortunately, anonymity is almost a default setting online, while tying one's identity to every online communication would be not only technically burdensome, but downright dangerous.  How would we do anonymous hotlines and tip lines?  There would have to be exceptions for such cases.  And VPN and other technologies exist that currently encumber even the most vigorous attempts to identify people online, such as in criminal investigations. 

 

The Tea app is facing not only its data-breach problem, which always is disturbing to users, but also the moral question of whether anonymous comments by women about men they have dated are fair to the men.  Such a question can be answered on a case-by-case basis, but in general, if women had to sign their real names to every comment they posted on Tea instead of remaining anonymous, the comments might not be as frank as they are now. 

 

The same principle applies to student evaluations conducted not by a commercial app, but by my university.  Students are guaranteed anonymity for the obvious reason that if they make a negative comment, and the professor finds out who said it, the student might have to take another one of the professor's classes, in which the professor might be tempted to wreak vengeance upon the unhappy but honest student.  So I accept the idea of anonymity in that situation, because I might otherwise be tempted to abuse my authority over students that way.

 

If Tea were really confined only to women users, there wouldn't seem to be any danger of that sort of thing happening.  But a woman could turn traitor, so to speak:  seeing a bad review of her current boyfriend on Tea, she could show it to him, and if the review was tied to the identity of the woman who gave him the bad review, he might consider some kind of revenge.  That would be bad news as well, so anonymity makes sense for Tea too. 

 

Still, when people know their names are associated with things they say, they tend to be more moderate in their expressions than if they hide behind a pseudonym and can flame to their hearts' content without any fear of retribution.  Some systems allow the option of either signing your name or remaining anonymous, and possibly that is the best approach.

 

Tea presents itself as a way to find "green flags," that is, women going online and saying what a good guy this was and you ought to date him.  If he's so good, why not keep him for yourself?  Realistically, I expect most of the comments are negative, which is why the site has been criticized to the extent it has been. Assuming the operators of Tea address their data breach, they can take comfort in the old saying attributed (perhaps apocryphally) to P. T. Barnum:  "There's no such thing as bad publicity."  More women know about Tea now, and so more men may get reviewed.  I only hope they get the reviews they deserve.

 

Sources:  The Associated Press article "The Tea app was intended to help women date safely.  Then it got hacked," appeared on July 26, 2025 at https://apnews.com/article/tea-app-data-breach-leak-4chan-c95d5bb2cabe9d1b8ec0ca8903503b29.  I also referred to an article at https://www.hims.com/news/dating-in-person-vs-online for the statistic about percentage of couples meeting online, and to the Wikipedia article on Tea (app). 

Can Teslas Drive Themselves? Judge and Jury To Decide

 

On a night in April of 2019, Naibel Benavidez and her boyfriend Dillon Argulo had parked the Tahoe SUV they were in near the T-intersection of Card Sound Road and County Road 905 in the upper Florida Keys.  George McGee was heading toward the intersection "driving" a Model S Tesla.  I put "driving" in quotes, because he had set the vehicle on the misleadingly-named  "full self-driving" mode.  It was going about 70 MPH when McGee dropped his cellphone and bent down to look for it.

 

According to dashcam evidence, the Tesla ran a stop sign, ignoring the blinking red light above the intersection, crashed through reflective warning signs, and slammed into the SUV, spinning it so violently that it struck Naibel and threw her 75 feet into the bushes, where her lifeless body was found by first responders shortly thereafter.  Dillon survived, but received a brain injury from which he is still recovering.

 

Understandably, the families of the victims have sued Tesla, and in an unusual move, Tesla is refusing to settle and is letting the case go to trial. 

 

The firm's position is that McGee was solely at fault for not following instructions on how to operate his car safely.  The driver should be prepared to take over manual control at all times, according to Tesla, and McGee clearly did not do that. 

 

The judge in the federal case, Beth Bloom, has thrown out charges of defective manufacturing and negligent misrepresentation, but says she is hospitable toward arguments that Tesla "acted in reckless disregard of human life for the sake of developing their product and maximizing profit."

 

Regardless of the legal details, the outlines of what happened are fairly clear.  Tesla claims that McGee was pressing the accelerator, "speeding and overriding the car's system at the time of the crash."  While I am not familiar with exactly how one overrides the autopilot in a Tesla, if it is like the cruise control on many cars, the driver's manual interventions take priority over whatever the autopilot is doing.  If you press the brake, the car's going to stop, and if you press the accelerator, it's going to speed up, regardless of what the computer thinks should be happening. 

 

The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) has promulgated its six levels of vehicle automation, from Level 0 (plain old human-driven cars without even cruise control) up to Level 5 (complete automation in which the driver can be asleep or absent and the car will still operate safely).  The 2019 Tesla involved in the Florida crash was most likely a Level 3 vehicle, which can operate itself in some conditions and locations, but requires the driver to be prepared to take over at any time. 

 

McGee appears to have done at least two things wrong.  First, he was using the "full self-driving" mode on a rural road at night, while it is more suitable for limited-access freeways with clear lane markings.  Second, for whatever reason, when he dropped his phone he hit the accelerator at the wrong time.  This could conceivably have happened even if he had been driving a Level 0 car.  But I think it is much less likely, and here's why.

 

Tesla drivers obviously accumulate experience with their "self-driving" vehicles, and just as drivers of non-self-driving cars learn how hard you have to brake and how far you have to turn the steering wheel to go where you want, Tesla drivers learn what they can get by with when the car is in self-driving mode.  It appears that McGee had set the car in that mode, and while I don't know what was going through his mind, it is likely that he'd been able to do things such as look at his cellphone in the past while the car was driving itself, and nothing bad had happened.  That may be what he was doing just before he dropped the phone.

 

At 70 MPH, a car is traveling over 100 feet per second.  In a five-second pause to look for a phone, the car would have traveled as much as a tenth of a mile.  If McGee had been consciously driving a non-autonomous car the whole time, he probably would have seen the blinking red light ahead and mentally prepared to slow down.  But the way things happened, his eyes might have been on the phone the whole time, even after it dropped, and when he (perhaps accidentally) pressed the accelerator, the rest of the situation plays out naturally, but unfortunately for Naibel and Dillon.

 

So while Tesla may be technically correct that McGee's actions were the direct cause of the crash, there is plenty of room to argue that the way Tesla presents their autonomous-driving system encourages drivers to over-rely on it.  Tesla says they have upgraded the system since 2019, and while that may be true, the issue at trial is whether they had cut corners and encouraged ways of driving in 2019 that could reasonably have led to this type of accident.

 

In an article unrelated to automotive issues but focused on the question of AI in general, I recently read that the self-driving idea has "plateued."  A decade or so ago, the news was full of forecasts that we would all be able to read our phones, play checkers with our commuting partners, or catch an extra forty winks on the way to work as the robot drove us through all kinds of traffic and roads.  That vision obviously has not come to pass, and while there are a few fully autonomous driverless vehicles plying the streets of Austin right now—I've seen them—they are "geofenced" to traverse only certain areas, and equipped with many more sensors and other devices than a consumer could afford to purchase for a private vehicle. 

 

So we may find that unless you live in certain densely populated regions of large cities, the dream of riding in a robot-driven car will remain just that:  a dream.  But when Tesla drivers presume that the dream has become reality and withdraw their attention from their surroundings, the dream can quickly become a nightmare.

 

Sources:  I referred to an Associated Press article on the trial beginning in Miami at https://apnews.com/article/musk-tesla-evidence-florida-benavides-autopilot-3ffab7fb53e93feb4ecfd3023f2ea21f.  I also referred to news reports on the accident and trial at https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/trial-against-tesla-begins-in-deadly-2019-crash-in-key-largo-involving-autopilot-feature/3657076/ and

https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/man-wants-answers-after-deadly-crash/124944/. 

 

Are AI Chatbots Really Just Pattern Engines?

 

That's all they are, according to Nathan Beacom, who wrote recently in the online journal The Dispatch an article with the title "There Is No Such Thing as Artificial Intelligence." 

 

His point is an important one, as the phrase "artificial intelligence" and its abbreviation "AI" have enjoyed a boom in usage since 2000, according to Google's Ngrams analysis of words appearing in published books.  The system plots frequency of occurrence, as a percentage, versus time.  The term "AI" peaked around 1965 and again around 1987, which correspond to the first and second comings of AI, both of which fizzled out as the digital technology of the time and the algorithms used were inadequate to realize most of the hopes of developers.

 

But starting around 2014, usage of "AI" soared until in 2022 (the last year surveyed by the Ngram machine), it stands at a level higher than the highest peak ever enjoyed by a common but very different phrase, "IRS."  So perhaps people now think the only inevitable things are death and AI, not death and taxes.

 

Kidding aside, Beacom says that the language we use about the technology generally referred to as AI has a profound influence on how we view it.  And his point is that a basic philosophical fallacy is embedded in the term "artificial intelligence."  Namely, what AI does is not intelligent in any meaningful sense of the term.  And fooling ourselves into thinking it is, as millions are doing every day, can lead to big problems.

 

He begins his article with a few extreme cases.  A woman left her husband because he developed weird conspiracy theories after he became obsessed with a chatbot, and another woman beat up on her husband after he told her the chatbot she was involved with was not "real."

 

The problem arises when we fall into the easy trap of behaving as though Siri, Alexa, Claude, and their AI friends are real people, as real as the checkout person at the grocery store or the voice who answers on the other end of the line when we call Mom.  Admittedly, quite a few of the chatbots out there would pass the Turing test, which compares the responses to typed commands and queries between a human being and a computer. 

 

But to believe that an AI chatbot can think and possesses human intelligence is a mistake.  According to Beacom, it's as much a mistake to believe that as it was for the probably apocryphal New Guinea tribesman who, when first hearing a voice come out of a radio, opened it up to see the little man inside.  The tribesman was disappointed, and it didn't do the radio any good either.

 

We can't open up AI systems to see the works, as they consist of giant server farms in remote areas that are intentionally hidden from view, like the Wizard of Oz who hid behind a curtain as he tried to astound his guests with fire and smoke.  Instead, companies promote chatbots as companions for elderly people or entertainment for the lonely young.  And if you decide to establish a personal relationship with a chatbot, you are always in control.  The algorithms are designed to please the human, not the other way around, and such a relationship will have little if any of the unpredictability and friction that always happens when one human being interacts with another human being. 

 

That is because human intelligence is a clean different kind of a thing than what AI does.  Beacom makes the point that all the machines can do is a fancy kind of autocomplete function.  Large-language models use their huge databases of what has been said on the Internet to predict what kind of thing is most likely to come after whatever the human interlocutor says or asks.  And so the only way it can sound human is by basing its responses on the replies of millions of other humans. 

 

But an AI system no more understands what it is saying, or thinks about your question, than a handheld calculator thinks about what the value of pi is.  Both a simple electronic calculator and the largest system of server farms and Internet connections are fundamentally the same kind of thing.  A newborn baby and its elemental responses to its environment, as simple as they are, represents a difference in kind, not degree, from any type of machine.  A baby has intelligence, as rudimentary as it is.  But a machine, no matter how complex and no matter what algorithms are running on it, is just a machine, as predictable (in principle, but no longer in practice in many cases) as a mechanical adding machine's motions.

 

Nobody in his right mind is going to treat a calculator like it was his best friend.  But the temptation is there to attribute minds and understanding to AI systems, and the systems' developers often encourage that attitude, because it leads to further engagement and, ultimately, profits.

 

There is nothing inherently wrong with profits, but Beacom says we need to begin to disengage ourselves from the delusion that AI systems have personalities or minds or understanding.  And the way he wants us to start is to quit referring to them as AI. 

 

His preferred terminology is "pattern engine," as nearly everything AI does can be subsumed under the general category of pattern repetition and modification. 

 

Beacom probably realizes his proposal is unlikely to catch on.  Terms are important, but even more important are the attitudes we bring toward things we deal with.  Beacom touches on the real spiritual problem involved in all this when he says that those who recognize the true nature of what we now call AI will "be able to see the clay feet of the new idol." 

 

Whenever a friend of mine holds his phone flat, brings it to his mouth, and asks something like "What is the capital of North Dakota?" I call it "consulting the oracle."  I mean it jokingly, and I don't think my friend is seriously worshipping his phone, but some people treat AI, or whatever we want to call it, as something worthy of the kind of devotion that only humans deserve.  That  is truly idolatry.  And as the Bible and history prove, idolatry almost always ends badly.

 

Sources:  Nathan Beacom's article "There Is No Such Thing as Artificial Intelligence" appeared in The Dispatch at https://thedispatch.com/article/artificial-intelligence-morality-honesty-pattern-engines/.

 

Has AI Made College Essays Pointless?

 

That's the question that Bard College professor of literature Hua Hsu asks in the current issue of The New Yorker.  Anyone who went to college remembers having to write essay papers on humanities subjects such as art history, literature, or philosophy.  Even before computers, the value of these essays was questionable.  Ideally, the task of writing an essay to be graded by an expert in the field was to give students practice in analyzing a body of knowledge, taking a point of view, and expressing it with clarity and even style.  The fact that few students achieved these ideals was beside the point, because, as Hsu says in his essay, "I have always had a vague sense that my students are learning something, even when it is hard to quantify."

 

The whole process of assigning and grading essay papers has recently been short-circuited by the widespread availability of large-language-model artificial intelligence (AI) systems such as ChatGPT.  Curious to see whether students at large schools used AI any differently than the ones at his exclusive small liberal-arts college, Hsu spent some time with a couple of undergraduates at New York University, which has a total graduate-plus-undergraduate enrollment of over 60,000.  They said things such as "Any type of writing in life, I use A. I."  At the end of the semester, one of them spent less than an hour using AI to write two final papers for humanities classes, and estimated doing it the hard way might have taken eight hours or more.  The grades he received on the papers were A-minus and B-plus.

 

If these students are representative of most undergraduates who are under time pressure to get the most done with the least amount of damage to their GPA in the subjects they are actually interested in, one can understand why they turn to resources such as ChatGPT to deal with courses that require a lot of writing.  Professors have taken various tacks to deal with the issue, which has mostly flummoxed university administrations.  Following an initial panic after ChatGPT was made publicly available in 2022, many universities have changed course and now run faculty-education courses that teach professors how to use ChatGPT more effectively in their research and teaching.  A philosophy professor, Barry Lam, who teaches at the University of California Riverside, deals with it by telling his class on the first day, "If you're gonna just turn in a paper that's ChatGPT-generated, then I will grade all your work by ChatGPT and we can all go to the beach."  Presumably his class isn't spending all their time at the beach yet, but Lam is pretty sure that a lot of his students use AI in writing their papers anyway.

 

What are the ethical challenges in this situation?  It's not plagiarism pure and simple.  As one professor pointed out, there are no original texts that are being plagiarized, or if there are, the plagiarizing is being done by the AI system that scraped the whole Internet for the information it comes up with.  The closest non-technological analogy is the "paper mills" that students can pay to write a custom paper for them.  This is universally regarded as cheating, because students are passing off another person's work (the paper mill's employee) as their own. 

 

When Hsu asked his interviewees about the ethics of using AI heavily in writing graded essays, they characterized it as a victimless crime and an expedient to give them more time for other important tasks.  If I had been there, I might have pointed out something that I tell my own students at the beginning of class when I tell them not to cheat on homework. 

 

A STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) class is different than a humanities class, but just as vulnerable to the inroads of AI, as a huge amount of routine coding is now reportedly done with clever prompts to AI tools rather than writing the code directly.  What I tell them is that if they evade doing the homework either by using AI to do it all or paying a homework service, they are cheating themselves.  The point of doing the homework isn't to get a good grade; it is to give your mind practice in solving problems that (a) you will face without the help of anything or anybody when I give a paper exam in class, and (b) you may face in real life.  Yes, in real life you will be able to use AI assistance.  But how do you know it's not hallucinating?  Hsu cites experts who say that the hallucination problem—AI saying things that aren't true—has not gone away, and may actually be getting worse, for reasons that are poorly understood.  At some level, important work, whether it's humanities research papers to be published or bridges to be built, must pass through the evaluative minds of human beings before it goes straight to the public. 

 

That begs the question of what work qualifies as important.  It's obvious from reading the newspapers I read (a local paper printed on actual dead trees, and an electronic version of the Austin American-Statesman) that "important" doesn't seem to cover a lot of what passes for news in these documents.  Just this morning, I read an article about parking fees, and the headline and "see page X" at the end both referred to an article on women's health, not the parking-fees article.  And whenever I read the Austin paper on my tablet, whatever system they use to convert the actual typeset words into more readable type when you select the article oftenmakesthewordscomeoutlikethis.  I have written the managing editor about this egregious problem, but to no avail.

 

The most serious problem I see in the way AI has taken over college essay writing is not the ethics of the situation per se, although that is bad enough.  It is the general lowering of standards on the part of both originators and consumers of information.  In Culture and Anarchy (1869) (which I have not read, by the way), British essayist Matthew Arnold argued that a vital aspect of education was to read "the best that has been thought or said" as a way of combating the degradation of culture that industrialization was bringing on.  But if nobody except machines thinks or says those gems of culture after a certain point, we all might as well go to the beach.  I actually went to the beach a few weeks ago, and it was fun, but I wouldn't want to live there. 

 

Sources:  Hua Hsu's "The End of the Essay" appeared on pp. 21-27 of the July 7 & 14, 2025 issue of The New Yorker.  I referred to the website https://newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-7/committed-knowledge-the-modern-past/matthew-arnold-on-learning-the-best-which-has-been-thought-and-said for the Arnold quote. 

Supreme Court Validates Texas Anti-Porn Law

 

On Friday, June 27, the U. S. Supreme Court issued its decision in the case of Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton.  The Free Speech Coalition is an organization representing the interests of the online pornography industry, and Kenneth Paxton is the controversial attorney general of Texas,whose duty it is to enforce a 2023 law which "requires pornography websites to verify the age of users before they can access explicit material," according to a report by National Review.  The Court upheld the Texas law, finding that the law was a constitutional exercise of a state's responsibility to prevent children from "accessing sexually explicit content." 

 

This ruling has implications beyond Texas, as 22 other states have adopted similar laws, and the decision of the court means that those states are probably safe from federal lawsuits as well.

 

This is a matter of interest to engineering ethicists because, whether we like it or not, pornography has played a large role in electronic media at least since the development of consumer video-cassette recorders in the 1970s.  As each new medium has appeared, the pornographers have been among its earliest adopters.  Around 1980, as I was considering a career change in the electronic communications industry, one of the jobs I was offered was as engineer for a satellite cable-TV company.  One of the factors that made me turn it down was that a good bit of their programming back then was of the Playboy Channel ilk.  I ended up working for a supplier of cable TV equipment, which wasn't much better, perhaps, but that job lasted only a couple of years before I went back to school and remained in academia thereafter.

 

The idea behind the Texas law is that children exposed to pornography suffer objective harm.  The American College of Pediatricians has a statement on their website attesting to the problems caused by pornography to children:  depression, anxiety, violent behavior, and "a distorted view of relationships between men and women."  And it's not a rare problem.  The ubiquity of mobile phones means that even children who do not have their own phone are exposed to porn by their peers, and so even parents who do not allow their children to have a mobile phone are currently pretty defenseless against the onslaught of online pornography. 

 

Requiring porn websites to verify a user's age is a small but necessary step in reducing the exposure of young people to the social pathology of pornography.  In an article in the online journal The Dispatch, Charles Fain Lehman proposes that we dust off obscenity laws to prosecute pornographers regardless of the age of their clientele.  The prevalence of porn in the emotional lives of young people has ironically led to a dearth of sexual activity in Gen Z, who have lived with its presence all their lives.  In a review of several books that ask why people in their late teens and 20s today are having less sex than previous generations, New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino cites the statistic that nearly half of adults in this age category regard porn as harmful, but only 37% of older millennials do.  And fifteen percent of young Americans have encountered porn by the age of 10.

 

There are plenty of science-based reasons to keep children and young teenagers from viewing pornography.  For those who believe in God, I would like to add a few more.  In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells his disciples that they must "become like children" to enter the kingdom of Heaven.  Then he warns that "whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin [the Greek word means "to stumble"], it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea."  (Matt. 18:6).  People who propagate pornography that ten-year-olds can watch on their phones seem to fill the bill for those who cause children to stumble. 

 

The innocence of children can be overrated, as anyone who has dealt with a furious two-year-old can attest.  But it is really a kind of mental virginity that children have:  the absence of cruel and exploitative sexual images in their minds helps keep them away from certain kinds of sin, even before they could understand what was involved.  Until a few decades ago, most well-regulated societies protected children from the viewing, reading, or hearing of pornography, and those who wished to access it had to go to considerable efforts to seek out a bookstore or porn theater.

 

But that is no longer the case, and as Carter Sherman, the author of a book quoted in the New Yorker says, the internet is a "mass social experiment with no antecedent and whose results we are just now beginning to see."  Among those results are a debauching of the ways men and women interact sexually, to the extent that one recent college-campus survey showed that nearly two-thirds of women said they'd been choked during sex. 

 

This is not the appropriate location to explore the ideals of how human sexuality should be expressed.  But suffice it to say that the competitive and addictive nature of online pornography invariably degrades its users toward a model of sexual attitudes that are selfish, exploitative, and unlikely to lead to positive outcomes. 

 

The victory of Texas's age-verification law at the Supreme Court is a step in the right direction toward the regulation of the porn industry, and gives hope to those who would like to see further legal challenges to its very existence.  Perhaps we are at the early stages of a trend comparable to what happened with the tobacco industry, which denied the objective health hazards of smoking until the evidence became overwhelming.  It's not too early for pornographers to start looking for millstones as a better alternative to their current occupation. 

 

Sources:  The article "Supreme Court Upholds Texas Age-Verification Law" appeared at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/supreme-court-upholds-texas-age-verification-porn-law/, and the article "It's Time to Prosecute Pornhub" appeared at https://thedispatch.com/article/pornhub-supreme-court-violence-obscenity-rape/.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article "Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton" and the New Yorker article "Sex Bomb" by Jia Tolentino on pp. 58-61 of the June 30, 2025 issue.