At the outset of “The Bogey of Automation,” a 1965 essay about what he took to be overblown fears of the computerization of the American economy, Daniel Bell wryly notes that “it may be useful to keep in mind an old Jewish saying: For example is no proof.” By way of example, we have collected six pieces from our archives about the coming of artificial intelligence. To explain them, we asked ChatGPT to write a one-paragraph introduction:

In thought-provoking explorations of the ever-evolving landscape of Artificial Intelligence (AI), these articles from the archives of The New York Review of Books delve into the profound impact of AI on society, cognition, and the very nature of being human. Examining both the promises and perils of this transformative technology, the authors critically examine the ethical dilemmas, the potential for job displacement, and the intricate interplay between human intelligence and its machine counterpart. With a keen eye on the intersections of technology, philosophy, and culture, the insightful pieces challenge us to reconsider our assumptions and engage in a nuanced dialogue about the future of AI and its implications for our collective future.

Jessica Riskin
A Sort of Buzzing Inside My Head

“My teaching assistants and I became expert at sniffing out AI-generated essays by their flat, featureless feel, the literary equivalent of fluorescent lighting.”

Tim Parks
DeepL Edizioni

“Machine translation will very likely fill the world with texts that may be grammatically correct and even semantically accurate, yet nevertheless alien to the spirit of the language they were written in.”

Michael C. Dorf and Laurence H. Tribe
Court v. Chatbot

“Who—or perhaps we should say what—has a more developed moral sense: the Supreme Court of the United States or a chatbot that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to answer just about any imaginable inquiry?”

Sue Halpern
The Human Costs of AI

“AI has been used to monitor farmers’ fields, compute credit scores, kill an Iranian nuclear scientist, grade papers, fill prescriptions, diagnose various kinds of cancers, write newspaper articles, buy and sell stocks, and decide which actors to cast in big-budget films in order to maximize the return on investment. By now, AI is as ambient as the Internet itself.”

Bernard Williams
How Smart Are Computers

“Hubert Dreyfus may well be right in claiming that many tasks that are simple for human beings would need systems quite undreamed of in practice for their machine simulation. But his claim to have proved the limitations of computers is exaggerated. If one shakes together the considerations that Dreyfus brings forward, one can extract, I think, three kinds of arguments for his conclusion; and all, it seems to me, leave the issue still open.”

Hubert Dreyfus, reply by Bernard Williams
An Exchange on Artificial Intelligence

“Williams’s grasp of conditions in the flashy field of AI is both disingenuous and provincial.”

“It may be that AI is on the wrong track, and its assumptions absurdly simplistic. But if it is, we shall not come to know it, nor be helped to get clear about these things, through the kind of philosophy Dreyfus is trying to bring to bear.”

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