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“I could hack into any system on the internet, and control it.”
... persuade bank employees to give over sensitive customer information and ...

The new chatbot is generating a lot of hype, but we would do well to consider its human and environmental cost
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January 1966... Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer scientist at MIT, unveiled Eliza, which would have been called the world’s first chatbot if that term had existed at the time. Weizenbaum wrote the software ... to demonstrate that communications between humans and computers were inevitably superficial.
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Weizenbaum wrote the program to show that while machines could apparently copy human behaviour, it was really just like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat: an illusion. And once you know how the trick was done, Weizenbaum thought, it ceased to be an illusion. There was nothing secret about Eliza: if you read the code then you could understand how it did its stuff. What took its creator aback was that even if people knew it was just a program they seemed to take it seriously. There’s a famous story about his secretary asking him to leave the room while she had her “conversation” with Eliza. People were utterly entranced by it.
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After the publication of Weizenbaum’s paper about Eliza, it didn’t take long for some people (including some practising psychiatrists) to start saying that, if a machine could do this kind of thing, who needed psychotherapists? Weizenbaum was as appalled by this as today’s educationists and artists are by the contemporary slavering over the tools of generative AI.
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The intriguing echo of Eliza in thinking about ChatGPT is that people regard it as magical even though they know how it works as a “stochastic parrot”– (in the words of Timnit Gebru, a well-known researcher) or as a machine for “hi-tech plagiarism” (Noam Chomsky).
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Weizenbaum pointed out that we are incessantly striking Faustian bargains with this technology. In such contracts, both sides get something: the devil gets the human soul; humans get the services that delight us. Sometimes, the trade-off works for us, but with this stuff, if we eventually decide that it does not, it will be too late.
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It's only when you click on "CNET Money Staff," that the actual "authorship" is revealed.

"This article was generated using automation technology," reads a dropdown description, "and thoroughly edited and fact-checked by an editor on our editorial staff."

Since the program began, CNET has put out around 73 AI-generated articles. That's not a whole lot for a site that big, and absent an official announcement of the program, it appears leadership is trying to keep the experiment as lowkey as possible. CNET did not respond to questions about the AI-generated articles.

4:24 What does all this mean for us? Boston Dynamics is often keen to emphasize the friendly nature of it's robot family. Their vision is of a world where robots are our helpful companions, not our robot overlords.

4:45 They're able to do the most dangerous jobs you'd rather not give to a human.

5:00 As experts have noted, robots and smart algorithms are set to devour much of the jobs market in the early 21st century... transportation... construction... security industries... military... Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS)...

7:15 ... as benign as they are brilliant? Or are we inventing our way to a new ruling class?

3:58... AIs could be given responsibility for increasingly important tasks and decisions until they're effectively in control.

4:06... Neuralink will help us keep up with AI and share its power. ...tied to our will... it could be a huge upgrade but there's another side to it... using Neuralink to control things with their thoughts... decodes neural activity... it will know us better than we know ourselves... and they plan to start putting them in humans in 6 months. (That would be approximately July 2023) Some will hate the idea of having a chip in their heads, but younger people may be more open to it.

4:36 And AI can be extremely persuasive... The AI lies much less than expected. People think that diplomacy is about deception, but it's actually about building trust.

5:17 AIs could use their collective intelligence to outsmart humans. They could learn from each other and share knowledge, leading to rapid advances in their capabilities.

5:30 Do you think companies will prioritize safety? Chatbot answers: It is likely that companies will prioritize the AI goldrush over safety as it offers the opportunity to make large profits quickly.

1:15 "... think they know more than they do. And they think they are smarter than they actually are. This tends to plaque smart people. They define themselves by their intelligence. And they don't like the idea that a machine can be way smarter than them, so they discount the idea."

2:45 "... the percent of intelligence that is not human is increasing. And eventually we will represent a very small percentage of intelligence.

3:04 "... all the things we like and hate and fear, they're all there on the internet, they are projections of our limbic system and we are all feeding this network with our questions and answers. We are all collectively programming the AI..."

4:22 "Your phone is already an extension of you ... most people don't realise they are already a cyborg if that phone is an extension of yourself... a cybernetic extension..."

4:53 "The merge scenario with AI is the one that seems probably the best... for us...If you can't beat it, join it."

5:12 "From a long-term existential standpoint... that's the purpose of Neuralink... create a high bandwidth interface with the brain such that we can be symbiotic with AI"

6:11 "regulation... insight and oversight to confirm that everyone is developing AI safely"

6:38 "What to do about mass unemployment? This is going to be a massive social challenge. I think ultimately we will have to have some kind of Universal Basic Income. I don't think we are going to have a choice. I think it will be necessary. There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better. I want to be clear. These are not things that I wish would happen... these are simply things that I think probably will happen. If my assessment is correct and they probably will happen then we need to say what are we going to do about it?"

7:29 "... the output of goods and services will be extremely high. With automation will come abundance. Almost everything will get very cheap"

8:00 "The much harder challenge is... how do people then have meaning? A lot of people derive their meaning from their employment. So if you don't have... if you're not needed... if there's not a need for your labour... that's a much harder problem to deal with."

9:39 (Jobs and career fields) " technologist... sustainable energy, genetics & synthetic biology, AI... going from analog to digital... technology tools are definitely double-edged swords, the more powerful the technology, the more careful we need to be in how we use it."

It was just over 4 years ago that an article in Fortune magazine suggested that technology may replace 40% of jobs in 15 years. Now with 11 years remaining in that prediction's time frame, we are becoming aware of more technological advances.

In a YouTube video just over 7 minutes long, we are acquainted with a variety of robotic technology by Boston Dynamics.