As the scientific evidence began to pile up, a consensus finally emerged that leaded gasoline had turned out to be one of the most harmful pollutants of the 20th century, one that proved to be especially concentrated in urban areas. Globally, the phaseout of leaded gasoline that began in the 1970s is estimated to have saved 1.2 million lives a year. As Achim Steiner of the United Nations noted, “The elimination of leaded petrol is an immense achievement on par with the global elimination of major deadly diseases.”

Source of the above: New York Times Great Read
OpenAI Unveils GPT-4
What GPT-4 Can and Can’t Do
Funding Frenzy Escalates
How Chatbots Work

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The Shift
GPT-4 Is Exciting and Scary. Today, the new language model from OpenAI may not seem all that dangerous. But the worst risks are the ones we cannot anticipate.
Photo: The team from OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, from left: Sam Altman, chief executive; Mira Murati, chief technology officer; Greg Brockman, president; and Ilya Sutskever, chief scientist. Credit…Jim Wilson/The New York Times
The Shift By Kevin Roose March 15, 2023 :

When I opened my laptop on Tuesday to take my first run at GPT-4, the new artificial intelligence language model from OpenAI, I was, truth be told, a little nervous.

After all, my last extended encounter with an A.I. chatbot — the one built into Microsoft’s Bing search engine — ended with the chatbot trying to break up my marriage.

It didn’t help that, among the tech crowd in San Francisco, GPT-4’s arrival had been anticipated with near-messianic fanfare. Before its public debut, for months rumors swirled about its specifics. “I heard it has 100 trillion parameters.” “I heard it got a 1,600 on the SAT.” “My friend works for OpenAI, and he says it’s as smart as a college graduate.”

These rumors may not have been true. But they hinted at how jarring the technology’s abilities can feel. Testing GPT-4 had caused the person to have an “existential crisis,” because it revealed how powerful and creative the A.I. was compared with the tester’s own puny brain.

GPT-4 didn’t give me an existential crisis. But it exacerbated the dizzy and vertiginous feeling I’ve been getting whenever I think about A.I. lately. And it has made me wonder whether that feeling will ever fade, or whether we’re going to be experiencing “future shock” — the term coined by the writer Alvin Toffler for the feeling that too much is changing, too quickly — for the rest of our lives.

Below is the observation of Nan:

Might AI not be so willing to phase themselves out if they become as deadly for humans as leaded gas? What then, eh?

P.s. Nan received this pop up when she turned her computer on this morning: