AI Insights

From Skynet to Medicare: Your questions about artificial intelligence: The Readers Write

Published

3 days ago

September 3, 2025

When we asked more than 3,100 subscribers what they would like to see in a primer on artificial intelligence — something to help the uninitiated understand chatbots, their uses, and their dangers — the 240-plus replies painted a vivid picture of curiosity, skepticism, fear and even excitement about how AI is reshaping lives.

Many people said they simply want the basics, a kind of “AI 101” for ordinary users. Others demanded deeper explorations of ethical questions, the environmental costs of sprawling data centers, and the risks of misinformation flooding social media.

And nearly everyone expressed at least some anxiety about what this technology means for the future of jobs, education, health care, and democracy itself. Some framed their concern in terms of the “Skynet scenario. A reference to the Terminator movies in which a self-aware AI system called Skynet tries to annihilate humanity.

We posed our question in a message to more than 3,100 subscribers to our From the Editor weekday texts. You can sign up for free at www.joinsubtext.com/chrisquinn.

Starting with the basics

A large number of readers admitted they don’t know where to start. “Need a primary description for the uneducated like myself to understand basics of AI, then proceed from there please,” one wrote. Another added bluntly: “I don’t know anything about accessing AI, what it looks like, how to find it, very basic stuff.”

Several asked us to cut through the jargon. “I need an introductory course — AI101. My eyes glaze over when the subject is AI.” Others stressed the importance of showing what AI is not. “It’s NOT a search engine, and people in general don’t know how to use TOOLS like ChatGPT,” one reader said.

Another asked, “Can you compare the accuracy and speed of the most widely used chat bots? Also, a quick review of where they get their data and how it is acquired would be helpful.”

Practical examples were in demand. “For the uninitiated local folks, some prompts and responses could be a good start. For example a prompt could be: what is the best tree to plant in Westlake Ohio for maximum shade within 10 years?” Another said, “What can I use AI for in my personal world? Not necessarily for work. How can it help me as I navigate the world as a 40-70 year old who wasn’t born using computer technology?”

Fear of misuse and misinformation

If curiosity dominated part of the feedback, fear dominated another.

“My biggest issue is that people think current AI is actually intelligent. At the end of the day, they are still just more advanced algorithms,” one person wrote. Another warned, “We’ve heard concerns where incorrect or devious information might be churned out by, say, bots, to flood the Internet with this misinformation, thereby AI draws on that to produce wrong results.”

Many readers linked AI directly to politics and propaganda. “Trump and sycophants using it to keep control, as the people of this country can’t be bothered to apply logic to anything they see and accept at face value,” one message said. Another asked whether government would act: “Will there be some kind of government control to filter out the false statements within an AI post? Too many people are gullible to believe anything.”

Others focused on the personal consequences of AI-generated deception. “I would LOVE to see AI covered in a guide as I am quite fearful of it,” one person wrote. Another said, “I would like to use it to create minutes for committee meetings … But I worry about all the fake news that manipulates public opinion on social media and other platforms. AI can create fake videos of people saying things they never said.”

The erosion of trust in information sources was a repeated theme. “My greatest fear is a further proliferation of misinformation. We need a tool to verify factual information,” one reader said. Another put it more simply: “How do we know what is real & what is AI generated garbage?”

Questions about impact

Beyond the basics and the fears, many readers pressed for deeper explorations of AI’s societal effects. Some asked about jobs: “What jobs will people do when AI replaces their jobs. No one talks about that.” Another warned, “Beyond the Skynet scenario, the biggest concern is the more immediate impact of unemployment. Not only would there be less tax revenue generated, but there would be an insufficient safety net for those impacted.”

Health care was another focus. “I worry about health insurance companies using AI to deny treatments and procedures in order to save money,” one reader said. Another asked, “The New York Times broke a story this weekend that AI will be used in determining eligibility for some procedures for Medicare patients … Perhaps you can report more on this.”

Environmental concerns came up repeatedly. “For me it’s the tremendous stress it’s putting on the computing and electrical grid and by extension the planet. All because we can’t put these devices down and think for ourselves.” Others asked directly, “How much is AI raising our electric rates?” and “Is the environmental cost (water & electric consumption) worth it?”

Still others looked at education. “Will students rely too heavily on ChatGPT and be unable to string together a coherent sentence without assistance?” one asked. Another wondered, “If young people become dependent on it, they won’t be able to write anything using their own brain. We already have a generation of kids that can’t even sign their name using cursive.”

And some readers simply pleaded for transparency. “Specifically I want to understand how your newsroom is using AI and what the policy is for reporters,” one message said.

Here are seven thought-provoking responses:

AI isn’t always right but it always sounds right and I can see that causing real world pain.

Garbage in, garbage out. I would be less worried if we didn’t have so many alternative facts.

Seeing is believing! … With today’s state of society where so many facts are either misconstrued or even blatantly manufactured, I am beyond fear of where we are headed with the proliferation of AI generated videos, voice recording and photographs.

The difference between AI and human knowledge … An AI’s ‘experience’ is limited to the data it is fed. It doesn’t build up a personal base of common-sense knowledge the way a human does.

My fear is that too many hallucinations will further disrupt our understanding of the truth. We are already truth-challenged due to the Trump administration.

AI isn’t always bad. I used an AI bot to troubleshoot a digital picture frame … the bot diagnosed remotely and sent me the replacement cord free of charge and all is well with my photo memories.

It’s probably the most important invention since the telephone.

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AI Insights

Microsoft Says Azure Service Affected by Damaged Red Sea Cables

Published

4 hours ago

September 6, 2025

The Editors

Microsoft Corp. said on Saturday that clients of its Azure cloud platform may experience increased latency after multiple international cables in the Red Sea were cut.

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Geoffrey Hinton says AI will cause massive unemployment and send profits soaring

Published

4 hours ago

September 6, 2025

The Editors

Pioneering computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, whose work has earned him a Nobel Prize and the moniker “godfather of AI,” said artificial intelligence will spark a surge in unemployment and profits.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Financial Times, the former Google scientist cleared the air about why he left the tech giant, raised alarms on potential threats from AI, and revealed how he uses the technology. But he also predicted who the winners and losers will be.

“What’s actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers,” Hinton said. “It’s going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits. It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer. That’s not AI’s fault, that is the capitalist system.”

That echos comments he gave to Fortune last month, when he said AI companies are more concerned with short-term profits than the long-term consequences of the technology.

For now, layoffs haven’t spiked, but evidence is mounting that AI is shrinking opportunities, especially at the entry level where recent college graduates start their careers.

A survey from the New York Fed found that companies using AI are much more likely to retrain their employees than fire them, though layoffs are expected to rise in the coming months.

Hinton said earlier that healthcare is the one industry that will be safe from the potential jobs armageddon.

“If you could make doctors five times as efficient, we could all have five times as much health care for the same price,” he explained on the Diary of a CEO YouTube series in June. “There’s almost no limit to how much health care people can absorb—[patients] always want more health care if there’s no cost to it.”

Still, Hinton believes that jobs that perform mundane tasks will be taken over by AI, while sparing some jobs that require a high level of skill.

In his interview with the FT, he also dismissed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s idea to pay a universal basic income as AI disrupts the economy and reduce demand for workers, saying it “won’t deal with human dignity” and the value people derive from having jobs.

Hinton has long warned about the dangers of AI without guardrails, estimating a 10% to 20% chance of the technology wiping out humans after the development of superintelligence.

In his view, the dangers of AI fall into two categories: the risk the technology itself poses to the future of humanity, and the consequences of AI being manipulated by people with bad intent.

In his FT interview, he warned AI could help someone build a bioweapon and lamented the Trump administration’s unwillingness to regulate AI more closely, while China is taking the threat more seriously. But he also acknowledged potential upside from AI amid its immense possibilities and uncertainties.

“We don’t know what is going to happen, we have no idea, and people who tell you what is going to happen are just being silly,” Hinton said. “We are at a point in history where something amazing is happening, and it may be amazingly good, and it may be amazingly bad. We can make guesses, but things aren’t going to stay like they are.”

Meanwhile, he told the FT how he uses AI in his own life, saying OpenAI’s ChatGPT is his product of choice. While he mostly uses the chatbot for research, Hinton revealed that a former girlfriend used ChatGPT “to tell me what a rat I was” during their breakup.

“She got the chatbot to explain how awful my behavior was and gave it to me. I didn’t think I had been a rat, so it didn’t make me feel too bad . . . I met somebody I liked more, you know how it goes,” he quipped.

Hinton also explained why he left Google in 2023. While media reports have said he quit so he could speak more freely about the dangers of AI, the 77-year-old Nobel laureate denied that was the reason.

“I left because I was 75, I could no longer program as well as I used to, and there’s a lot of stuff on Netflix I haven’t had a chance to watch,” he said. “I had worked very hard for 55 years, and I felt it was time to retire . . . And I thought, since I am leaving anyway, I could talk about the risks.”

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AI Insights

NFL player props, odds, bets: Week 1, 2025 NFL picks, SportsLine Machine Learning Model AI predictions, SGP

Published

5 hours ago

September 6, 2025

The Editors

The arrival of the 2025 NFL season means more than just making spread or total picks, as it also gives bettors the opportunity to make NFL prop bets on the league’s biggest stars. From the 13 games on Sunday to Monday Night Football, you’ll have no shortage of player props to wager on. There are several players returning from injury-plagued seasons a year ago who want to start 2025 off on the right note, including Trevor Lawrence, Alvin Kamara and Stefon Diggs. Their Week 1 NFL prop odds could be a bit off considering how last year ended, and this could be an opportunity to cash in.

Kamara has a rushing + receiving yards NFL prop total of 93.5 (-112/-114) versus Arizona on Sunday after the running back averaged 106.6 scrimmage yards in 2024. The Cardinals allowed the eighth-most rushing yards per game to running backs last year, in addition to giving up the eighth-most receiving yards per game to the position.

Before making any Week 1 NFL prop bets on Kamara’s Overs, you also have to remember he’s now 30, playing under a first-year head coach and has a young quarterback who’s winless in six career starts. If you are looking for NFL prop bets or NFL parlays for Week 1, SportsLine has you covered with the top Week 1 player props from its Machine Learning Model AI.

Built using cutting-edge artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques by SportsLine’s Data Science team, AI Predictions and AI Ratings are generated for each player prop.

Now, with the Week 1 NFL schedule quickly approaching, SportsLine’s Machine Learning Model AI has identified the top NFL props from the biggest Week 1 games.

Week 1 NFL props for Sunday’s main slate

After analyzing the NFL props from Sunday’s main slate and examining the dozens of NFL player prop markets, the SportsLine’s Machine Learning Model AI says Bengals WR Tee Higgins goes Under 63.5 receiving yards (-114) versus the Browns in a 1 p.m. ET kickoff. Excluding a 2022 game in which he played just one snap, Higgins has been held under 60 receiving yards in three of his last four meetings with Cleveland.

Entering his sixth NFL season, Higgins has never had more than 58 yards in any Week 1 game, including going catchless on eight targets versus the Browns in Week 1 of 2023. The SportsLine Machine Learning Model projects 44.4 yards for Higgins in a 5-star pick. See more Week 1 NFL props here.

Week 1 NFL props for Bills vs. Ravens on Sunday Night Football

After analyzing Ravens vs. Bills props and examining the dozens of NFL player prop markets, the SportsLine’s Machine Learning Model AI says Ravens QB Lamar Jackson goes Over 233.5 passing yards (-114). The last time Jackson took the field was against Buffalo in last season’s playoffs, and the two-time MVP had 254 passing yards and a pair of touchdowns through the air. The SportsLine Machine Learning Model projects Jackson to blow past his total with 280.2 yards on average in a 4.5-star prop pick. See more NFL props for Ravens vs. Bills here.

You can make NFL prop bets on Jackson and others with the Underdog Fantasy promo code CBSSPORTS2. Bet at Underdog Fantasy and get $50 in bonus bets after making a $5 bet:

Week 1 NFL props for Bears vs. Vikings on Monday Night Football

After analyzing Vikings vs. Bears props and examining the dozens of NFL player prop markets, the SportsLine’s Machine Learning Model AI says Bears QB Caleb Williams goes Under 218.5 passing yards (-114). Primetime games like what he’ll see on Sunday night weren’t too favorable to Williams as a rookie. He lost all three he played in, had one total passing score across them, was sacked an average of 5.3 times and, most relevant to this NFL prop, Williams failed to reach even 200 passing yards in any of the three. The SportsLine Machine Learning Model forecasts him to finish with just 174.8 passing yards, making Under 218.5 a 4.5-star NFL prop. See more NFL props for Vikings vs. Bears here.

You can also use the latest FanDuel promo code to get $300 in bonus bets instantly:

How to make Week 1 NFL prop picks

SportsLine’s Machine Learning Model has identified another star who sails past his total and has dozens of NFL props rated 4 stars or better. You need to see the Machine Learning Model analysis before making any Week 1 NFL prop bets.

Which NFL prop picks should you target for Week 1, and which star player has multiple 5-star rated picks? Visit SportsLine to see the latest NFL player props from SportsLine’s Machine Learning Model that uses cutting-edge artificial intelligence to make its projections.

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