Our popular culture has generally typecast Artificial Intelligence (AI) as the evil villain. In the movies, the plot typically involved humans becoming overly dependent on a super intelligent AI, which realizes it is smarter than its’ human creator, becomes self-aware and decides to take control and chaos ensues. Hollywood also likes to give the AIs the launch codes to our nuclear arsenal. Remember the Terminator movies? A malevolent AI named Skynet with access to our nuclear launch codes unleashed nuclear Armageddon on the human race fearing humans were going to shut it down — the so-called Judgment Day.

AI has suddenly dominated the news cycle and we have been bombarded with a full discourse on AI’s technological benefits and AI as an existential threat. AI tech executives presented before Congress, Wall Street projected billions of dollars will be made on this new technology and the media provided over the top coverage. 

What triggered all this attention? Last November, OpenAI, the public purpose corporation whose mission is to ensure AI benefits all humanity, released Chat GPT, its’ AI Chatbot text application, generating over 100 million users in only a few months making ChatGPT the fastest growing application in tech history. 

I am here to report that AI Armageddon is not around the corner but a bell has been rung. I visited the OpenAI site and signed up for the free service (there is a $20 per month premium tier). ChatGPT has a Prompt window similar to a Google search window. The product uses a Large Language Model (LLM), a type of AI that’s very good at predicting what word should come next to the point where it understands context and can produce the material requested for things like topic reports, business letters, poems, etc. I created a “Chat” and entered a prompt asking for information about sci-fi movies that had AI as the villain. In seconds the information appeared. 

Rather than simply provide me a list of publisher content sites to visit like a typical Google search, the ChatGPT search information appeared as a summary report. Compared to a Google search, it did a lot of heavy lifting since I did not have to visit each site to gain a basic understanding of the subject matter. This is only true as long as you trust the information being generated. I followed up with a more refined Prompt and hit the “Regenerate Response” button and more detailed information appeared. It was Google on steroids and I liked the way it interacted or chatted with the user.

In 2015, OpenAI was originally formed as an “open source” (publically accessible source code) non-profit company in contrast to a closed source, for-profit company like Google. An open source free model is a noble endeavor but hard to monetize. The co-founders committed $1 billion and included superstar tech entrepreneurs: Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Peter Thiel (PayPal), Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO (Y Combinator) and Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX), among others. In 2018, Musk resigned from the OpenAI board and is now a leading voice talking about the dangers of AI. In 2019, OpenAI converted into a hybrid “capped for-profit” company to be able to grow, compete and attract investors. Earlier this year, Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAI, a declaration of war on Google and other tech giants. Google was caught flat footed by the OpenAI media explosion, which was odd since ChatGPT took direct aim at Google’s core search business. Google quickly rushed out news about its AI product called Bard. Microsoft says OpenAI software is now being integrated into its Bing search engine (a distant #2 search engine behind Google for decades) and into other Microsoft products. 

 

Is AI Pandora’s Box or a Magic Treasure Chest? In addition to text, AI is rapidly expanding to include video, voice, graphic and photo applications and will only get exponentially smarter and scarier. Wall Street says AI will be one of the greatest technological advancements in human history that will increase productivity, GDP and eliminate tasks but not jobs. The reality is that AI will be very disruptive and eliminated millions of jobs including white-collar jobs. Think about your own business experience and imagine all the jobs that could be done by a very, very smart AI assistant. State and Federal government will have to develop innovative public policy to cope with this coming job carnage and avoid what happened when tech innovation and foreign competition eliminated millions of blue-collar jobs and government was asleep at the wheel. Does anyone believe Congress is up to this task? 

 

Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, his company now center stage, appeared before Congress and basically begged for AI regulation. Now that is rare. His visit may have been contrived to buy time and create some good will. He knows there is 2024 presidential election coming and if you were appalled by what happened on social media during the last election cycle imagine what AI-powered lying will produce. If blamed for the shenanigans AI could gain super villain status. 

 

Regulating AI will also be hard. The EU will lead as it generally does on all tech regulation but it needs to be a worldwide effort and how effective can it be without China. At the very least, all AI content should be labeled as such, include a list of its source materials and should always respect the content owner’s intellectual property rights. Unfortunately, I see decades of copyright infringement litigation. Content owners, in response to yet another attack on their business model by tech giants, will claim AI is stealing their intellectual property and demand compensation.

 

It is not Judgment Day yet but I read that Super Intelligent AI is coming by 2049. Best you hide the nuclear launch codes now. 

 

Hugh Panero, a tech & media entrepreneur, was the founder & former CEO of XM Satellite Radio. He has worked with leading tech venture capital firms and was an adjunct media professor at George Washington University. He writes about tech and media for the Spy.

 

Driving around Talbot County you have likely passed a series of small white flags on the road that say “Proposed Fiber Optic” and large bright orange spools of cable and wondered, “What is going on”. This is all part of the great broadband rural expansion on the eastern shore.

Gas, water and electricity are considered essential services thus worthy of regulation and economic support. Knocking at the door of essential service status is broadband service, especially in rural areas. Broadband access ensures equal opportunities for remote learning and work, improves healthcare coverage through telemedicine innovations and encourages rural economic development. During COVID, we saw the digital divide up close as our neighbors, trapped in their homes, struggled without access to reliable, high speed, affordable broadband service.  Broadband access is an essential tool rural communities need to stay competitive in an ever changing, technology driven world. 

The white flags belong to Easton Utilities. After decades of living in a rural digital desert, we are experiencing a huge wave of fiber optic construction activity fueled by significant government funding in the form of grants, matching funds and loans, all focused on bringing high speed broadband to underserved rural communities. These funds come from the Department of Agriculture (Rural Utility Service), Maryland Rural Development Funds and County funds and have been awarded to familiar local utility companies Easton Utilities, through its Easton Velocity subsidiary, and Choptank Electric Cooperative, through its Choptank Fiber subsidiary. 

Leading the charge in Talbot County is Easton Velocity with a $25 million “Connect Talbot” project to provide broadband access to about 3,600 households over a five-year period. Choptank Fiber has raised $50 million over the last three years and recently entered into a partnership with Bay Country Communications, which will add Dorchester and Talbot Counties to its Internet service area. An area that already includes Caroline, Cecil, Queen Anne’s, Somerset, Wicomico and Worcester Counties. Choptank is prioritizing getting broadband service to its Cooperative membership over a ten-year period. 

Supporting rural communities in this manner is not new. In 1932 only 10 percent of rural America was electrified. The Rural Electrification Administration was formed in 1935 under President Franklin Roosevelt as part of the New Deal and dramatically expanded electrical coverage to struggling farms and rural communities using low cost loans. Then Congressman Lyndon Johnson from rural Texas worked tirelessly with the REA to funnel financial support to rural electric cooperatives and bring electricity and all its benefits (refrigeration, electric light, etc) to rural America. It showed what government can do when the private industry fails to seize the moment. 

The private sector in our current broadband drama is the cable industry. Cable operators with no viable competitor held all the cards when it came to providing broadband to rural America. Cable operators applied a simple calculation: if a community had less than 30 homes per mile it wasn’t worth the cost of building out with few homes generating limited revenue. A few wealthy rural enclaves could occasionally coax a cable operator to wire their area if enough residents picked up the construction tab and committed upfront to a service package. Making matters worse, satellite providers DirecTV and Dish did not have a competitive satellite-delivered broadband offering. More recently, Elon Musk’s highly anticipated Startlink service rollout has struggled. This left rural communities, especially, low-income communities, on the very dark side of the digital divide.

One of the first people to sound the alarm about the urgent need to provide reliable and fast, rural broadband access was Blair Levin in the 2010 Broadband Plan for America, which he authored for the FCC during the Obama administration. Thankfully, over the next decade, broadband access gradually became an appealing political issue, especially during an election cycle. Republicans and Democrats, along with President’s Trump, Biden and Maryland’s Governor, Larry Hogan, as well as state and local legislators, could easily support making sure rural voters were not left behind. This political support led to broad Federal, State and local funding. This funding was the real catalyst to get things moving since no local utility was willing to go it alone financially and needed government help to subsidize the capital-intensive fiber optic build-out. Yet again, government working with non-profit utilities intervened to help rural communities.

There are several grant restrictions relating to the broadband rollout. For example, Easton Velocity and Choptank Fiber cannot compete with an existing broadband provider. Each utility has detailed maps, which identify the specific homes allowed to receive their service in their designated service areas. Therefore, if you are a Breezeline broadband customer and you want to switch to Easton Velocity, which recently wired your street — it’s not going to happen. Broadband technology rollouts are challenging. The utilities will learn as they go. So far they seem to be doing a pretty good job. For more information visit the Easton Velocity and Choptank Fiber websites.

 Hugh Panero, a tech & media entrepreneur was the founder & former CEO of XM Satellite Radio. He has worked with leading tech venture capital firms and was an adjunct media professor at George Washington University. He writes about Tech and Media for the Spy.