Powerful Enough

Artificial intelligence is arriving faster than our wisdom to guide it. Star Wars already showed us where that road leads.

He wasn't evil. He was powerful enough. That was the problem.

A gifted nineteen-year-old, more capable than anyone raising him, was handed the galaxy before anyone taught him what the power was for. He was overconfident, defensive, and right enough about his abilities that no one could tell him no.
Three films showed how that ends.
In Powerful Enough, technologist S. James Champion argues that artificial intelligence is walking the same road. Not because AI is a character from those movies. Because both are what you get when enormous capability arrives before anyone has worked out what the capability is for, and the people in charge are improvising.
This is not a doom book. It is a book about a fork.

Inside you'll find:
Why benchmark scores are a blood test that measures the wrong thing
How the systems fail like a talented teenager: overconfident, defensive, easy to talk past the rule
The Qui-Gon problem: good people who override the safety finding and are gone before the bill arrives
What the model is actually doing, in plain language, without the homework

Written for curious readers, not engineers. Specific, candid, and grounded in stories you already know.
We are not at the fall of the Republic. We are standing at the fork. The kid couldn't see the fork. We can. That is the only advantage we have.

S. James Champion is a technologist, a father, and the founder of Remu Technologies.

Powerful Enough is an independent work of commentary and is not affiliated with, authorized, or endorsed by Lucasfilm Ltd. or The Walt Disney Company.