A novel world

Dan Cearns THE STANDARD

With the way things have been worldwide, over the last few years, you can forgive people who may sometimes feel like they are living in a science fiction or dystopian novel.

We've lived through a multi-year pandemic, which saw restrictions, limiting what we could do when we left the house. This included the threat of a world-changing and ever-adapting virus hanging over all of us.

Then there's Russia's invasion of Ukraine, with a world leader actively threatening the potential of a nuclear response, if any Western country gets involved in the conflict. The war, which has been raging for over a year, threatens Ukraine's sovereignty and the world's geopolitical order.

Now, recent conversation has been shifting to Artificial Intelligence (AI). The recent developments in chatbot technology and the emergence of the company ChatGPT have led to new conversations about the ability of computers and machines to think or process information, and make decisions similar to humans.

Recently, Amazon announced they planned to start using AI to summarize product reviews on their website. Some municipalities are looking into ways AI can help them improve municipal services; from streamlining routes to using weather models to planning the usage of road salt in the winter. There is even the possibility of using AI in healthcare to detect new emerging illnesses.

In the creative world, AI has been a topic of concern. In the current Hollywood writers' strike, AI has been one of the negotiated points, as writers look to not become replaced with AI-generated scripts and want to maintain their creative license, by not being required to use AI in the creation of their scripts.

In an interview, on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in March, director Steven Spielberg said, the use of AI-generated art in place of creations from graphic designers has him "very nervous."

"You're basically taking something you created, and you made, which is the computer, and giving the computer autonomy over your point of view and yourself as the human person," he explained in the interview.

The old saying is seeming more and more true that "truth is stranger than fiction," as the world continues to develop in front of our eyes.