The Acme Building Science and Pizza Society is meeting again around the big table near the kitchen in Eddie’s Pizza Place. It’s my deal so I set the next topic. “Artificial Intelligence.” There’s some muttering but play starts.

Cal has first honors. “Not my favorite thing. I hadda change my name ’cause of A.I., f’crying out loud.”

Eddie antes up a chip. “But Cal, your astronomy magazines are loaded with new discoveries that some A.I. made rummaging through godzillabytes of big telescope data. Train an A.I. on a few thousand normal galaxies and then let it chase through the godzillabytes. It says ‘Here’s a weird one‘ and the human team gets to publish papers about a square galaxy or something.”

Susan chips in. “What about all the people who’ve been saved from cancer because an A.I. found bad cells while screening histology images?”

Kareem folds. “Not much A.I. in Geology yet. Our biggest Big Data project these days is whole‑Earth tomography. That uses pretty much all the computer time we can get funds for. A.I.’s Large Language Models soak up all the research money.”

Vinnie raises by a chip. “I use autopilot a lot when I’m flying, but that’s up in the air, Great Circle point‑to‑point and no worries about pedestrian traffic. Autopilot in a car? Not for me, thanks — too many variables and I’ve seen too many crazy situations you couldn’t predict. Black ice in the winter, roadwork and bicyclists the rest of the year — I want to be able to steer and brake when I need to.”

Susan grins. “Are you a stick‑shift purist, Vinnie?”

“Naw, automatic transmissions are okay these days and besides my car uses electric motors and doesn’t even have a transmission. Lots of torque at low revs and that’s the way I like it. What about you, Cathleen? Got any A.I. war stories?”

Cathleen calls Vinnie’s raise. “A few. One thing I’ve learned — chatbots have a limited working memory. I once asked a bot to list Jupiter’s 35 biggest moons in decreasing order of size. It got the first 24 in the right order, then some more moons out of order and two of them were moons of Saturn. So ‘trust but verify‘ like the man said. Sy, you do a lot of writing. What’s your experience?”

I call Cathleen’s raise. “Mixed. I’m a generalist so I have to read a lot of papers or at least be aware of them. Summarizer bots do a decent job on some reports but miss badly when it comes to tying together material that’s not already well organized. Probably comes from that working memory limitation you noticed, Cathleen. The other problem I’ve seen doesn’t apply so much to technical work but it’s a killer for essays and fiction that have anything to do with interactions between people.”

“I’ve seen that, too. No soul.”

“Soul’s the word I’ve been looking for, Kareem. The bots are good at picking up styles and ‘who said what‘ surface material, but they fail completely at emotional subtext, the ‘why‘ that’s the actual thread of a conversation. Subtext is why we read good novels. From what I’ve been seeing recently, it’s not going to get any better.”

“Nothing does, I’m starting to think.”

“C’mon, Cal, your coffee’s improved since the city put in better water pipes. On the other hand, you owe the pot a bet.”

“Sorry. I’m still in, okay?” <sound of chips clinking> “So why’s A.I. not gonna get better? I keep reading how different ones passed tougher tests.”

“Well, that’s the thing. If you’re reading about it online, the bots are, too. What they read goes into their training database. Those impressive test scores may just be the result of inadvertent cheating — but the software’s so opaque that its developers simply don’t know whether or not that’s true. Just another case of the Ouroboros Effect.”

Eddie and Susan meet Cal’s bet, then Vinnie goes all‑in and shows his three queens. “Ouroboros, Sy?”

“The Norse World Snake that eats its tail. Bogus A.I.‑generated output used as A.I. input yields worse output. That’s a loss, not a gain. Unlike here where my four kings take the pot.”

“Geez, Sy, again?”

~~ Rich Olcott