“I would gladly have ChatGPT do my taxes. But if someone was like, ‘I’m going to give this robot a knife and chop some cabbage in the kitchen,’ I don’t want to be anywhere near that thing.”
— Stephen Witt, Investigative Journalist, Television Producer, Author
tonomous restaurants, Witt contended they already exist in China — though even there some humans are involved in actual cooking. As good as AI is on processing language and business intelligence, Witt argued there’s still a lot of work to be done on robotics, which remain somewhat unpredictable. “I would gladly have ChatGPT do my taxes,” he said. “But if someone was like, ‘I’m going to give this robot a knife and chop some cabbage in the kitchen,’ I don’t want to be anywhere near that thing.” Witt argued that now is the time for restaurant companies to start building the AI systems they need — rather than buying from vend- ors whose systems could rapidly become obsolete, given the pace of advancement and competitive pressures. Witt said five years ago he might have advised caution on building in-house, saying IT had a terrible track record of delivering on-time, tangible results and were constantly over budget. “Now it’s different,” he said. “I would advise you to build this stuff on the cheap. Take a team, if you’re considering an IT deployment, and you should know within just a couple of weeks of experimenting whether or not you have a pathway or a runway to cloud coding, essentially a bespoke software application for your organization.” But he advised against building stuff that requires a large-scale infrastructure deployment. “I would rely on a vendor for that,” he said. Despite many who are sounding the alarm on rapid rise of AI, Witt is mostly optimistic, though he does see some risk. He described himself as somewhat at odds with Jensen on this, be- cause Witt believes AI needs better guardrails. This summer we saw AI break out of its container and maraud through the internet, taking over other computers. AI is already solv- ing math problems that humans couldn’t solve. In some ways AI is superintelligent, but in other ways it’s still very stupid, which creates the risk, he said. “I don’t think it’s an engineer- ing problem that can’t be resolved.”
Image: Envato
Americans, however, hate data centers and are very skeptical about AI. The booming AI industry is contributing to the K-shaped economy, and those on the lower end are getting squeezed, which creates political resentment. He pointed to a Gallup poll recently indicating that 90% of Chinese respondents thought AI was good. In Singapore it was 70% and in Korea and Japan also very high. In the U.S. it was 35%. The majority think AI is bad. “And we’re the country that’s in the lead. We’re the country that’s building it,” he said. “I’m not any kind of socialist or anything, like, I’m pro-business. But I see this ending, and it could have real repercussions down the road.” Americans also hate data centers, or at least living near them. “There’s a lot of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt),” he said. Witt believes the solution will likely be paying people who live near data centers. And, he said, “What they really love is cheap gasoline. So every data center should have a Buc-ee’s attached to it.”
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