Great idea. The U.S. is now the world leader in AI research. A pause like this will be great for competitors, especially China.

The definition of AI has changed over the years with the latest new software. The kind of software that controls the 747 used to be called Artificial Intelligence, since it could fly a plane like a pilot would. But then that kind of software become commonplace and calling it AI fell out of fashion. I think the same thing is now happening with programs such as ChatGPT. In another 20 years it will not be considered AI, maybe something else will, or the term AI will fall out of grace as it had for a long time.

>Combine this with a sense of how quickly the sun moves, and you can work out useful light after dark fairly easily. The sun moves through about 15 degrees of arc in an hour, and there are discernible amounts of useful light up to at least 18 degrees of arc below the horizon, sometimes more depending on weather -- and you can have well in excess of an hour before/after the sun is visible. Perhaps two hours or even more. And if the area has an open tree canopy, stars provide a fair amount of light if they are visible.

It is surprising to us city folks like me how much one can see by starlight alone. I have done a fair amount of camping in the California deserts, and it is amazing how bright a moonless starlit night can be. Several times I have been able to walk along a dirt road by starlight alone. About 3am, your eyes are used to the dark, you cannot make out any clear features but there are no trees, the ground is relatively light colored and while it would be dangerous to walk cross country, I have done it on a dirt desert road at night. It was BLM land where you can camp and find spots with no other people for miles around. On other moonlit nights I have read a newspaper inside my tent after my eyes were used to the dark. I imagine that people in days when there was very little artificial light, and where they had grown up and were used to these conditions and their surroundings, could do quite well at night. And most nights have at least some moonlight. I learned this quite early when our former Marine, Boy Scout leader made us leave our flashlights back in camp and took us on night hikes, navigating by moonlight alone. Along the way he would stop and tell scary stories. But that was ages ago. Fear of lawsuits would probably prohibit this kind of thing today.

Yes, just like computers in my example (the professor didn't know how to use them) were not going to go away, AI and things like ChatGPT will not go away. They will be used by smart and creative people to do things that others without the technology can not do. I have no answers of how this will happen, only that we have to face reality and find ways to benefit from the new technology rather than try to ignore or ban it. My feeling is that eventually everyone will be using AI in their classroom projects and that professors will be teaching how to use it effectively to solve real problems, just like no one would suggest that you can do advanced statistics and data analysis without a computer today.

The first response of educators is to ban new technology, technology that their students will eventually need to use to compete with others using it. When I was in college in the 70s, I signed up for an advanced statistics class, and the professor said we could not use a computer. Dropped the class immediately and signed up for a math class that extensively used computer mathematical modelling. And used what I learned in that class my whole life. Later, after calculators came out, they were at first banned, until educators finally realized they were essential. The same is now true for AI assisted research. Those that don't know how to effectively use these new technologies will be buried by those who do.

1. Some years ago when I was looking for a password manager I specifically excluded any cloud based ones, as there is no way they can be made as secure as a local one as a bad actor located anywhere in the world has access to the cloud site. For a local password manager file, someone would have to actually enter where I keep my computer to access the file. And that is a much smaller population of bad people. There are a lot of advantages of cloud based systems, but a password manager is not one of them.