Well, it has happened. Some people became too smart and helped open the doors to the development of something even smarter than they are.

Artificial Intelligence, AI, has been everywhere in the news lately. And that’s a good thing.

I agree with some of the experts in the field of this new and scary technology that this might be the greatest threat to humanity since the development of nuclear weapons.

As a writer I am concerned on a more personal level that ChatGPT, could take over the publishing industry on all fronts. Other jobs, especially clerical ones, also hang in the balance. Anyone who deals with words or numbers could be replaced.

ChatGPT is already super popular. Students are using it to write term papers for school. A couple recently used it to write wedding vows. There are new uses every day. Songwriters beware. It can also produce songs.

It is a technology that is smart and getting smarter. According to an article in Forbes magazine ChatGPT can basically do the thinking for you from “brainstorming ideas, planning your child’s birthday party or help you shop.

Last week, in a news report most credited to AI, a fake photo of an explosion near the Pentagon went viral. It briefly caused financial havoc before being exposed as false.

That is one of the more disconcerting facets of AI. How are we going to police the accuracy of what is produced. How could AI alter facts to fit its own goals?

On an even more fearful front AI could challenge the very existence of humanity. I have always said movies and television prepare us for the future, good or bad. Anybody remember “The Terminator” movies where humankind is being exterminated by machines.

That may have been science fiction but many experts in the field, including Sam Altman, whose firm created ChatGPT and Geoffrey Hinton, known as the “The Godfather of AI, are among the many who warn the technology poses “a risk of extinction” according to an article in the New York Post.

In a letter from the Center of AI Safety, the experts said, “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

That’s a long sentence that should fill all of us with some level of dread. There is now widespread worry about the future of AI, but it may be too late. Hinton left a job as vice president and engineering fellow at Google to campaign for control of the monster he helped invent.

Sara Brown, in an article on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology web site quotes Hinton’s concerns that it can’t be contained.

“It’s quite conceivable that humanity is just a passing phase in the evolution of intelligence,” Brown quotes Hinton as saying.

Some unappetizing food for thought.