politics & policy
Countdown to killer robots?
James Mildred
In December last year, OpenAI launched Chat GPT-4. It’s the most advanced chatbot yet, employing cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI).
You can ask it any question and it will come up with an answer, because it has access to a colossal amount of data. This extends even to the finer points of Baptist covenant theology, as I discovered recently.
Theologians debate super-fast rise of AI technology
Nicola Laver
‘Mitigating the risk of extinction from Artificial Intelligence (AI) should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war’ – so stated a single-sentence open letter to the world, signed by global experts.
The message was circulated on 30 May, signed by hundreds of top AI experts and other key figures including Bill Gates, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and the chief executive of Google DeepMind. They signed the statement with the aim to ‘open up discussion’. There have also been calls for regulation of AI.
Turning to griefbots or grieving with hope?
Two of the most atypical Marvel/Disney+ series of the past couple of years have been two of the most interesting.
Instead of action men, explosions, robots and galactic threats, they featured intelligent storytelling combined with a quirky central concept, and a female showrunner and predominantly female casts. They were both, unusually for big budget productions, also about grief. Wandavision (2021) gave us the poignant line: ‘What is grief, if not love persevering?’, and in Agatha All Along (2024) the burden of grief carried by the charismatic villainess helped to humanise her.