Machine Intelligence
I've spent time on AI research pursuing ideas about knowledge acquisition, and made progress on data compression. More recently I've looked at LLMs and what's now called "AI" (as if the years 1950 to 2010 never existed). The idea that LLMs have human-like intelligence is quite misguided. The main problem is semantics. John Searle revealed semantic errors in Turing's theory of symbolic intelligence. All symbolic theories suffer from the same severe difficulty - symbols are inherently meaningless. LLM's haven't solved the problem of semantics, the problem of understanding, either. Originally LLMs were described as symbolic - as being trained on text scraped from the internet, text being symbols. At least responsible media have stopped saying "text" and now say "data". There's no such thing as text on the internet. The only place it exists is on display screens and printouts of users. Computers process instances of electronic binary difference. LLMs don't understand. Superficially the seem to, but if they really did there wouldn't be "hallucinations", edge cases or catastrophic forgetting.
It's fascinating to see the billionaire class freaking out about AI Armageddon which they say is just round the corner, but that's not possible. To destroy humanity LLMs would need human-like sensorimotor apparatus. And they'd need an ability to survive in the wild, in the changing, hostile and complex real world. And they'd have to have both the processes and structures of human-like understanding. They might have something slightly like the structures but they don't have anything like the processes.
Personal
I was hoping for a quiet retirement, but hadn't counted on having to deal with New Zealand's public service. Or at least the largest part of it - the Ministry of Social Development. New Zealand really does have a major ethical problem with the public-facing management level of its public service. Hence it's no wonder the New Government has so strongly resisted creating an anti-corruption commission. Comparable countries have them, but if New Zealand did, quite widespread government corruption would be publicly revealed. And what untrustworthy government wants that?