Good morning, John. So it's starting to seem a little bit like this fun little AI thing that we're doing is going to be, um, about 30-40 different giant AI things over the next 3 months to 5 years. And I'm not really ready for that. So to try and get ready, here's one thing that I've been thinking about.

Fact number 1: Mongooses are native to India, and they're weasley little carnivores that chew up anything that's, like, small enough for them to get their teeth into. 

Fact number 2: When Europeans arrived and then began to colonize Hawaii, they brought with them rats. And those rats were a problem for a bunch of reasons, but specifically to this story, they were a problem for the European colonizers sugar plantation. And so, somebody got the bright idea into their heads to bring mongooses to Hawaii so that they would eat the rats because mongooses eat rats! And the mongooses did not do a particularly good job of controllin' the rat population, but they did a great job of eating a lot of native species that had never seen a mammalian carnivore before. An introduced species that is able to take root and change the ecology of an area, that's an invasive species. And if you introduce another species to try and control that invasive species, that's called biological control. And there are tons of stories of biological control going very wrong. 

Fact number 3: Meta's large language model artificial intelligence thing called LLaMa was leaked, which means that there is almost definitely a teenager somewhere in Orlando, Florida who has downloaded it and is running it on their home machine and teaching it to behave however that teen wants it to behave. And I'm only focusing on that teenager in Orlando right now because I would've been that teenager in Orlando if this had happened when I was a teenager. Ecosystems are incredibly complicated and it is very difficult to know what effect a change will have on the rest of the ecosystem. And the only thing that I can think of, that might be more complicated than an ecosystem, is a human society.

Now this is a bit of a leap and I don't love taking leaps, but it might be that a good way to imagine part of what's about to happen is that we're about to live in a society with a bunch of invasive species in it. There are no native mammals in Hawaii (except for one very cute bat) and so far in human history, there have been no counterfeit humans that can't do all of the things that humans can do but everything they do looks human to us. Who can have goals and work in the world in ways that we can't predict to achieve those goals? What does a society look like when it has those entities roving around in it and when those entities are controlled by everyone from that teenager in Orlando to Vladimir Putin? I don't know, but I think that we can take some lessons from the world of ecology. Like, there are some ecosystems that are more fragile; ecosystems that are more isolated and have less diversity are at greater risk; and there are some demographics and groups in our societies that maybe have fewer immunities built up to deal with rapid change. That is a thing to be aware of. This isn't gonna affect everybody equally. And also here's the thing: Now, we have gotten a lot better at things like biological control. We look very carefully for really specific controls on really specific target species. And then the last 30 or 40 years, there's actually been lots of biological control programs that you haven't heard about because they've been successful. We made a whole SciShow about this, you should watch it, it's good. And there are lots of people in artificial intelligence right now working very hard to say, "Ok, let's not be that random guy in Hawaii who ruined everything for everyone. Let's think a little bit. Let's try and understand what the implications of this are." This can be done in better ways and in worse ways, but right now, it feels like a lot of people are just thinking, "Hey this is inevitable. It might as well be me." 

So fact number 4: In ecology and everything else, the only thing we definitely know is that things are going to change. But those changes don't come linearly. There are periods where there is less change and periods of rapid change. And it's starting to feel kinda obvious that both for society and ecology the next couple of decades are gonna be kind of fast times. So if nothing else, get ready for that.

John, I'll see you on Tuesday.