What do AI and Timothy Leary have in common?

If you were around in the ’60s, you probably know who Timothy Leary was. If you weren’t around then, the short story is that he was a proponent of then-legal lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), aka “Acid,” and other psychedelic and hallucinogenic drugs. He coined the phrase, “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” which became a pop-culture mantra for the times.

The answer to the question of what Leary and AI — specifically the AI in Windows — have in common should now be rather obvious. They both hallucinate.

According to Microsoft itself in an article on videocardz.com, the AI agents in Windows hallucinate. The article quotes M$ about its agentic AIs, “…AI models still face functional limitations in terms of how they behave and occasionally may hallucinate.” (Emphasis in the original.)

The article goes on to say that M$ is attempting to contain the damage “when something goes wrong,” by running its AI agents in a Windows form of jail. I’m not convinced that has even a microscopic probability of preventing computational disasters. I mean, just look at all the success they’ve had with security in the past; and that’s in addition to the overall enshittification of their former flagship product.

Just imagine for a moment that you’re in the Emergency Room, or A&E, or whatever it’s called in your location. You’re critically ill, the doctors have no idea what’s wrong with you, and turn to the AI. The very AI that just dropped a dose of computational Acid is now going to diagnose you — if they can get it to pay attention long enough.

Perhaps the AI gets paranoid like Hal 9000 while operating your self-driving car; or the aircraft you’re flying home in.

I’ve mentioned these before, but they’re even more scary now: Elevators that decide the occupants are unworthy of continued existence; hospital AI that changes the prescriptions of humans that it deems an existential threat to itself or just that it doesn’t like their morals — or religion — or the schools they went to — or the jobs they do — or the color of their skin. A military AI that provides generals and political leaders with false information that advocates a first-strike nuclear attack as in “War Games?” And don’t forget “Colossus: The Forbin Project.”

I can think of hundreds of disastrous scenarios but I’ll let you consider the possibilities for yourself.