“but I am in no way any authority on the workings of it”
No one talks about it so I do.
Many years ago I wrote a program for a physicist that crawled up one side of a spectrometer waveform and back down the other side and told him what he otherwise would have figured out using a ruler.
I also once wrote a program that gobbled up a bunch of elevation data and produced a graph with contour lines.
The software sloggers have moved ahead and someone invented the futuristic “Artificial Intelligence” term.
But the artificial intelligence has become intrusive. For example, examining a photograph of a crowd of people and identifying individuals, or imitating someone’s voice.
And then there’s the annoying feature that’s appeared in the text editor I’m now typing in. When I typed “Artificial” above, “Intelligence” was automatically inserted after it.
When I say I am not an “authority” on it, I don’t know the programmatic underpinnings.
But I do know danger when I see it, and I see great danger in AI as an adjunct to totalitarian states.
Like Communist China. And our own.