"I can't do that, Dave"

Microsoft's chatbot, rolled out as part of the Bing search engine, seems to have the same program logic as the spaceship computer in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Tom's Hardware has an article with screen shots of several questions and queries that were posed to the AI chat software, and the responses are described as "an existential breakdown."

People are posting so many wrong answers, nonsensical answers, and just vague "press release" style information that I think many people will quickly recognize that the software cannot reliably provide correct and accurate information.

The idea that a piece of software can "think" is regarded by many computer scientists, including me, as a bit silly. It's just code; very complex and sophisticated code, but code nonetheless. We don't even know how are brains really work and store information, so the idea that we can just create some "smart" code is arrogant, to say the least.

The Dreyfus brothers, in 1986, wrote the book "Mind over Machine. The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer." They were skeptical then of the capabilities of AI, and I suspect they still would be today.

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