Brian Merchant: The creators of 'Mrs. Davis' have a radical idea for AI: Shut it down
Damon Lindelof and Tara Hernandez weren't thinking about humanlike chatbots or hallucinating algorithms when they hatched the idea for a TV series about a powerful artificial intelligence that entranced users around the world.
It was early 2020 and they were thinking about what we all were: Do I really need to decontaminate my Amazon packages, or wear a mask when I walk to the mailbox?
Talking on a phone while they walked their dogs, Hernandez quipped that she wished there was an app that could just tell them what to do. That got them to talking, Lindelof recalls: "I wish that that existed too. But I wouldn't trust it, because all the apps that exist on my phone are there to sell me things. What would a benevolent app look like? And what would it take for me to trust it?"
Three years later, the result, "Mrs. Davis," makes its creators seem pretty prescient. The show, which started streaming on Peacock this week, arrives just as OpenAI's text-generating , Google is launching its own AI program, Bard, and the other tech giants are following suit.now? Do we even AI everywhere?
