Book Synopsis
“A man, a plan; a thought, a bot.” No palindrome here—rather, an exchange of views between an annuitant of a Certain Age and a youthful (b. 2023) Large Language Model—“chatbot” in the vulgar parlance—in which the two parties discuss the prospects for “artificial generalized intelligence,” the present day state of the art, and the implications that might follow upon someday achieving this, assuming that the development has not already occurred unnoticed. The chatbot—of, as it readily acknowledges, “uncertain ontological status”—proves a considerably more coherent conversationalist than many figures in public life today.