A colleague built an expert system using a Prolog toolkit back in the early 1990s to be used by US Navy medical corpsmen (not doctors) stationed on submarines to assess whether patients with head injuries were gravely enough injured that they should be airlifted (via helicopter) to shore for help. He developed this system based on many hours of discussions with experts in head trauma (who were paid for their time) and the finished system was accepted by the Navy.

Since it was my friend's IP, he decided to see if it was something he could sell it on the non-military market to people who worked in remote areas. This effort went nowhere because the first lawyer he spoke with told him he was out of his mind if he wanted to take on that kind of potential liability.

What a difference 30 years makes: expertise is picked up for free (scrapping the Internet) and it appears that no one is liable if AI makes an oopsie.

This is the first really interesting post on /. in a long time. I've still got my copy of Bowle's "Beginners Guide for the UCSD Pascal System" which included a short appendix on how to get going on an Apple II (once you buy a Language Board add-on). I foresee learning some Rust in my future!

Back during the 1990s version of AI (Expert Systems) a colleague received a grant from NIH and the US Navy to develop an expert system for doing triage on head-wound victims. The Navy was interested in use in submarines at sea, which typically had limited medical support. If someone was seriously hurt a decision needed to be made whether they had to be picked up at sea via helicopter and taken ashore for treatment. Don't want to do that unless it's really needed. Hence, the desire for a computer-based expert system to help someone like a medical corpsman decide. My colleague worked with NIH with an eye towards marking it. After speaking with a lawyer, however, he decided that the legal risk wasn't worth the possible gains. So, if a doctor uses this AI and botches a diagnosis based on AI hallucinations leading to a patient's death, who in this loop is liable for what?? I'd think the lawyer would go for the deepest pockets, which in this case is MS.

Beat me to it.

As Dr. Harry Vanderspeigle would say - THIS IS SOME BULLSH*T. Guess I need to polish up my Linux admin skills.

I've got a great idea for an innovative and new concept. Provide all content absolutely free. Not only that, you don't need an Internet connection to use it, everything is broadcast using radio waves. Push content on a schedule that everyone knows. No need to search and search for what you want. Incredible savings! Everything is supported by just a few ads tucked in here and there.

Oh, wait.

So, DoJ, what about how Microsoft pretty much killed off a superior phone by essentially taking over Nokia?

I am an ionospheric physicist and I'm still working at age 75. Is that in their list?

Greedy bastards playing around with a technology about which they are clueless that could bring down the entire world's financial markets. What could possibly go wrong?

I recently purchased an M2Pro Mini, which forced me to jump from El Capitan on an older iMac directly into the sh**storm that is Ventura. The iOS-ification of macOS is not a myth, everyone can see it in action. I am already starting to revisit Linux and Linux hardware and will make the jump if this gets much worse. I was very pleased back in 2004 when I jumped from using two computers (Windows for office apps and Linux for real work) to being able to do it all on one machine. The early OS X systems were by no way perfect, but they were a lot better than what we're seeing coming out of the Great Spaceship of Appletown. The new hardware is great, but the new OS is not.

I remember building the GE kit mentioned in the wikipedia article in my 5th grade class. My first contact with computing.

No, because the only programmers that were involved were the ones who developed the (probably generic) training software for the AI. Once the AI is trained (euphemism for "after the weights for the ginormous number of neural-net levels/nodes in the AI were calculated") the AI is a black box. Stuff goes in, stuff comes out. If the out-stuff says "kill the operator", well, the operator gets fragged by the AI. Sounds like what they have done in their "fix" was to start adding kludge if-then-else code on the back end of the AI, which can extend into a near-infinite level of "oh dear, best fix that - Patch Level N ; oh dear, best fix that - Patch Level N+1;loop".

AI is artificial, but it is in NO manner intelligent. Nor are any programmers involved once the training platform is developed and implemented. Clearly, there is also very little intelligence at the user level (or decider level) either.

Holy freaking hell, people, we're talking about things that are basically jumped-up neural networks here - there is absolutely NO intelligence involved in ANY of this. One of the big problems is when one of these beasties has to deal with something that's outside what mathematicians call the span of their knowledge, as in anything that is different from what they were trained with, nobody knows what gibberish the A"I" might come up with. This is where it gets scary. I can very clearly see a scenario where the leader of a nation with nuclear weapons decides that the people around him cannot be trusted and turns everything over to one of these baskets of 0's and 1's, and said basket decides that launching everything right now is the best strategy.

I’m not a “grandma” but I am a 73-year-old gramps. I’ve been writing software and using computers of all sizes since the late 1960s, and I still write software for my own use on almost a daily basis. That said, godamit, I’ve always disliked constantly-changing UIs because it means I have to re-learn how to use my tools to do what I want to do. Rarely do I “want” to learn a new UI just for the hell of it. And as I got older, the saying about teaching old dogs new tricks starts to turn out to be true. I have only so much bandwidth for new stuff in addition to everything else I’m trying to do, and learning a new UI is REALLY low on my fun-to-do-o-meter. Change for the sake of making your company overlord think you’re accomplishing something is churn - nothing more, nothing less.

Wondering why the administration can't get this done? Read down TFA a bit and you'll see the name "Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.)" mentioned. She is even more of a reason that the Dems can't get anything done in the Senate than Sen. Manchin. She's heavily into feathering her own nest and not so much into this silly governing stuff.