and the possibility of a self-referential AI death spiral …

One of the unexpected side-effects of humanity’s entry into the nuclear age was a scramble for so-called ‘low-background’ steel. After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and prolific atmospheric nuclear testing, new radioactive elements filled our atmosphere. As a result, due to the air injection process in steelmaking, any steel made after the summer of 1945 had an increased radioactive signature. For most uses, like cars or buildings, this didn’t matter. But for certain sensitive scientific and medical equipment, steel’s radioactivity became a real issue. Thus was created a market need for steel that was created in the less-radioactive atmosphere before 1945—low-background steel. Interestingly, a big source of this important resource came from the enthusiastic scrapping of sunken battleships, including the scuttled WWI German fleet.

I mention this because we are now entering another new age—the age of AI.  The story of low-background steel came to mind recently as I started working with AI/ML companies in my consulting business. Like anybody with a healthy sense of self preservation, I’ve been immersing myself in this extraordinary, fast-moving revolution. I lived through several previous ones (personal computer, internet, smartphone), but I don’t remember any of them moving quite this fast. It’s obviously going to change just about every aspect of our lives. And the more I delve into the mechanics of Large Language Models and generative AI—and the more I watch AI’s light-speed propagation into daily life—the more I wonder if we’d crossed a line (in roughly the spring of 2022) where any content that existed before that moment should be considered “low-background content.” That is to say, content that was certifiably created by actual human beings rather than AI. Everything after should be considered suspect. — Read More