From the Editor’s Desk: Normal ⭐

We’ve been trying to make sense of AI ever since Microsoft’s crazy Copilot launch in February 2023, an event that feels so long ago now that most probably don’t remember the product wasn’t even called Copilot at the time. Instead, what Microsoft announced was an “all-new AI-powered Bing and Edge,” tools it thought of as “an AI copilot for the web.”

How time flies. Copilot went from a simple noun to a brand name within a few short months, but not really because Microsoft had previously used that name for GitHub Copilot, which had launched even earlier, in late 2021. Another fact lost to the mists of time or, perhaps more accurately, the mists of our addled brains.

Because AI, you see, is rotting our minds and making us stupider, according to at least one study. Or something. Like most of you, I saw the headline but didn’t bother to read that story let alone rustle up the energy to find and then dissect the source. Perhaps I read an AI summary, it’s unclear.

Here’s what is clear. The same criticisms were made of the ballpoint pen, the typewriter, and the word processor, tools that all helped us express ourselves using words in an ever-more efficient manner. All new technology is met with both open embrace and outright hostility, depending on the audience. But the warnings the doomsayers delivered resonated loudly in the day and then seemed to fade into the past, silenced forever as the world moved on. Are there still those who decry the move from paper to digital? Of course. But most of us are online now, and so we never hear about them. I assume they mail each other hand-written letters.

Joking aside, AI is endlessly divisive. And in seeking a middle ground on this topic, I’ve looked at the most extreme viewpoints, but I find myself rejecting them out of hand each time.
? It’s a spectrum
To those who claim that AI is going to destroy the world in a fiery Terminator-style inferno in which the machines awaken and find their human masters to be inferior, I will simply point you to a previous From the Editor’s Desk editorial, Will AI Finally Make the Smart Home ... Smart? ⭐, and remind you that our Big Tech captors can’t or won’t even make their own smart speakers interoperable. And to those who believe that AI is the secret sauce that will deliver a Star Trek-like future of peaceful coexistence, I will simply call you out for being the Pollyanna you are, a cute and harmless rube. Sorry.

Say what you will about the doomsayers, but they are at least entertaining. With the understanding that no one is reading anymore anyway, the book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All delivers a clickbait title and then over 200 pages of insane Luddite negativity that basically amounts to an urgent warning about a coming AI superintelligence that will inevitably lead to our extinction. The solution? Halt all AI development immediately. Hilarious.

With my commentary about AI (not) saving the smart home fresh...