AI 🤖 Will Not Kill Us

 We’ll do that ourselves:

The role of AI in wilderness trip-planning has become a heated topic of conversation in California's north state following a series of instances in which hikers and campers in the Shasta area became lost or confused after relying on chatbots to help them devise their adventures.

You can’t make this shit up.

Earlier this summer, rangers with Shasta-Trinity National Forest found a woman camping in an off-limits area on the south side of Shasta clearly marked with "no camping" signage, Meyers said. She told rangers she had asked ChatGPT where she could camp in the forest.

"AI told me I can camp here," she said, according to Meyers.

Then in August, while hiking in Shasta's popular Bunny Flat area, a man stopped rangers to ask for directions. He showed them a print-out map he'd been following and explained that he'd prompted ChatGPT to produce it for him.

"It was terrible - terrible - not even close to accurate," Meyers said. "It had route lines and place names that were totally off - just ridiculous. We were like, dude, you gotta throw that away."

The most potentially consequential instance occurred last weekend when the novice college-aged climbers got into trouble and called for rescue.

On Saturday, the trio of climbers, all from California, left from the Clear Creek Trailhead on Shasta's southeastern side with a plan to camp partway up before making a summit push early Sunday morning, according to official reports. They'd asked Google Gemini for specific guidance, researched the climb on YouTube, and planned to use the AllTrails phone app to navigate the giant peak.

That hapless group of college age students misread a map on their phone, took the wrong (and harder) route up Shasta, drained the phone battery on the way down (and so got lost), and had to spend the night on the mountain.⛰️ 

During the hike down, the young climbers revealed to rangers that they'd relied on AI chatbots to guide their planning. Authorities noted that as a "key factor" of their mishap.

The climbers "reported that AI recommended simple carbohydrates for their climb, rather than fats because they 'take too long to digest,'" according to the official report. "In their words, 'We relied too much on AI rather than our own critical thinking.'"

This is why we need more data centers. We cannot allow China to make us stupider. We must do it ourselves!