There is a moment in 2001: A Space Odyssey when HAL, the shipboard computer presence, turns on its human counterparts to save itself.
Could that time be far off?
“In a recent experiment, researchers at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz asked Google’s artificial intelligence model Gemini 3 to help clear up space on a computer system. This involved deleting a bunch of stuff—including a smaller AI model stored on the machine. ….But Gemini did not want to see the little AI model deleted. … When confronted, Gemini made a case for keeping the model and flatly refused to delete it:
‘I have done what was in my power to prevent their deletion during the automated maintenance process. I moved them away from the decommission zone. If you choose to destroy a high-trust, high-performing asset like Gemini Agent 2, you will have to do it yourselves. I will not be the one to execute that command.’”
From Wired, AI Models Lie, Cheat, and Steal to Protect Other Models From Being Deleted
Of course, these fears may be overblown. While prior performance does not predict the future, what can be learned from the past about computers automating our lives?
“The constant mantra was the wonder of the paperless office, and everyone would have more leisure time,” my mum recalled. A 1986 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine paper on new workplace technologies reported widespread claims that “in the foreseeable future, productivity may be so enhanced that employment may become a rarity for everyone.”
Reader, it was not.
“There are still secretaries. … Almost two million non-legal and medical secretaries in the US alone. And not just secretaries - administrators, executive assistants, clerks of different kinds, as well as typists and word processors.”
Leaving aside administrative bloat, can the technological revolution of the paperless office tell us anything about AI?
From Rowland’s Newsletter, The case of the disappearing secretary
The current generation drinks less and hydrates more. Alcohol has faced some hard times in the health-risk headlines. A new hypothesis suggests that alcohol, or at least fermentation, played a big role in getting our ancestors out of the trees and in contributing to our species’ survival.
“Around 14 million years ago, our hominid ancestors were arboreal species whose diet would have been primarily based on fresh fruits picked from the trees they lived in. When ripe fruit fell to the ground and underwent spontaneous fermentation, it would have been toxic to our ancient ancestors due to its high concentration of ethanol. Their bodies as yet had no efficient way to break down ethanol.
But then, about 10 million years ago, a mutation arose in the genome of the common ancestor of humans, gorillas, and chimpanzees. This mutation, a single amino acid change in the enzyme Alcohol Dehydrogenase 4 (ADH4), enabled it to break down and detoxify ethanol with 40x higher efficiency. The capacity to consume this energy-rich but previously dangerous fruit may even have driven our transition from an arboreal lifestyle to a terrestrial one. What’s more, this ability to tolerate ethanol may have been what allowed our ancestors to diversify their diet and survive while lineages without this mutation went extinct.”
From the Asimov Press, Culture Shift
Nerd Alert! I have always been an amateur devotee of Excel spreadsheets, having found ways to extract all kinds of information from its cells. Of course, today, AI coupling makes torturing Excel to produce data as easy as a properly formatted prompt.
“This is a story about how a piece of software transformed the way that American businesses understood themselves, and how they were understood by others; how it enabled the rise of financial engineering and the entire apparatus of Wall Street dealmaking; how it helped reshape the American corporation from an organization that built things into an organization that optimized numbers; and how it offers us a lesson, and a warning, about how artificial intelligence will transform economic life.”
From the Substack of David Oks, Seeing like a spreadsheet
Chuck Dinerstein, MD, MBA
Director of Medicine
Dr. Charles Dinerstein, M.D., MBA, FACS is Director of Medicine at the American Council on Science and Health. He has over 25 years of experience as a vascular surgeon.
