Making Jack!

The water is with the...

Making Jack! This is hell. This is hell.

behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

This is hell and the current fortune du jour that is attracting a criminal amount of speculative interest from venture capitalists and investors is AI, as in

artificial intelligence, whatever that is, because nobody really knows what it is, what it can be,

or, for that matter, where the idea even came from. A little over 40 years ago, President Reagan introduced

the idea of the Strategic Defense Initiative.

You may or may not remember it. You may have read about it in history books. It was sold to the

public by the state and the media as Star Wars after the science fiction movie series that

was a huge hit while Reagan was president. Nobody knew how SDI would work.

All that was known was from a short animation of a missile hitting another missile out

of the sky and a poorly done animation at that that was repeatedly shown during the news broadcasts.

A feat experts at the time, this colliding of missiles, they said it was outside of a cartoon.

It was impossible with that day's technology. Sure, you can make an animated cartoon of it, but in reality, it did not exist.

But with such pie in the sky aspirations, those seeking government grants or offering proposals for contracts with the state could promise pretty much, well, anything, as long as it was somehow tangentially related to the fictional Star Wars concept, which is the problem with whatever AI is, that it is something

nobody can quite explain, as our guests today will point out. In fact, most of our ideas around

AI, whether positive or negative, supportive or critical, are grounded not in reality, but

another science fiction movie series, The Terminator

franchise. As long as you say something is using AI, seemingly no matter what it is,

investors swoop in with boatloads of cash to back up your project while others scream

apocalypse. The problem is when it comes to funding AI,

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