Zico Kolter leads a 4-person panel at OpenAI that has the authority to halt the ChatGPT maker's release of new AI systems if it finds them unsafe. That could be technology so powerful that an evildoer could use it to make weapons of mass destruction. It could also be a new chatbot so poorly designed that it will hurt people's mental health.
If the recent embrace of seemingly-and only seemingly-autonomous machines is any indication, something much less chic than the future premised in " The Matrix " awaits us. During the 1999 film's sequence of down-the-rabbit-hole scenes, Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) flips the channel on the late-nineties metropolis as Neo (Keanu Reeves) knows it, revealing it to be a "computer-generated dream world" that pacifies a dozing human race whose bioelectricity is extracted by machines, for machines, circa 2197.