But you’re right — because the currently available consumer-facing AIs are specifically Large Language Model, their strength is specifically in the ambiguity of qualitative communication; somebody hasn’t thought to maybe make it able to be strictly analytical too.

As to the overall point, that the real threat from AI comes not from AI but from idiots believing that they can use it when they can’t, 100%. See the cases that keep coming up of lawyers including AI-hallucinated cases in their briefs. One day, one of those is going to get through undetected and potentially screw up the legal system.

In the end, I only managed to stumble across the right answer by checking back to the AI’s sources and finding a listicle of 1990s TV series that began with a wedding. The one that turned out to be what I remembered (as I’d only seen about half its pilot episode) was Ned & Stacey, which the AI had never even thought to suggest. With every one of the wrong answers it gave me, it insisted that yes, this was definitely what I was seeking even though the most cursory of examinations quickly made clear it wasn’t.

My conclusion from these experiences is that these AI engines are currently calibrated to be “yes-men” trying to tell us what we want to hear, not what we want to know. Grok and Microsoft Copilot were likewise telling you “Oh yes, we’ve got the kind of schedule you want right here!” while handing you something superficially made up to look like a proper schedule, but purely cosmetic and riddled with errors. The chance of any these Potemkin intellects ever becoming self-aware and trying to take over the world Skynet-style is effectively nil.

Speaking of a Terminator being unable to negotiate the stairs, that’s pretty much what happens to the decidedly subpar enforcer bot ED-209 in the first Robocop movie: it “loses to a flight of stairs” as the Honest Trailer puts it. A lot of the other stuff in that movie (e.g. Detroit becoming a “bankrupt crime-ridden hellhole”) has also turned out similar in real life, albeit usually even worse than in the movie (e.g. instead of creating a cybernetic cop to enforce the law, governments and corporations alike have pretty much just given up on Detroit). Seems we’re in the Robocop future, not the Terminator one.

That being the case, the real danger of AI seems to be not that it’ll try to take over anything—it’s programmed to be far too sycophantic for that—but that people will try to outsource all their more tedious mental tasks to it and thereby get too intellectually lazy to think for themselves. There had already been some danger of this with the advent of search engines; e.g. children who grew up never knowing what life was like before the internet are increasingly unable to figure out what to do when they don’t have access to it, e.g. when the power goes out. (“Well, if the power went out, I’d ask Google to—” “No, the power’s out. You don’t have access to Google, remember?” “What?”) AI is merely accelerating that trend remarkably quickly now.

You and I grew up in an era before all of this, so when the AI falls down on the job, we can still do it ourselves. The generations after ours, unfortunately, are likely to get a lot more dependent on these things to the point that they may end up in something like a “The Machine Stops” kind of future that E.M. Forster envisioned. Just like in that story, they may end up saying (as the world crumbles around them with no one knowing how to repair anything) “The internet’s breaking down! Somebody’s got to do something about it!” “Oh yes, I’m sharing your post with all my followers, and we agree: somebody definitely should.” “We could ask it to fix itself…” “I tried that, and Grok said it would, but so far nothing’s happening.”