When I sent my friends Jon and Billy links to a test version of the Catholic mental health app I’ve been working on, they both assumed I’d been hacked.
I can’t blame them. I’m not the most technologically astute person, and then there’s the issue of my ironic and detached disposition. “This is the most sincere thing you’ve EVER done since I’ve known you,” Jon texted me. We’ve been friends for the better part of 20 years. He’s my son’s godfather. I think he said that because he knew it would unnerve me.
It all started this past Friday when I read AI expert Dr. Alan D. Thompson’s thoughts on Anthropic’s latest version of its artificial intelligence (AI) program, Claude. “I don’t want to alarm anyone,” Thompson wrote, but “this model feels both superhuman and complete.”
Several other viral articles since then have contained similar “I don’t want to alarm anyone, but we’re all about to die” observations. I’m no expert in these matters, but like just about everyone not named Sam Altman, I’m worried about the rise of the robots and how it stands to upend all our lives.
