Scrolling through X--ugh, I deleted the app, so now I use the browser to look at it on my phone--a post from Farhad Manjoo caught my eye. It's a screen cap of a picture of five elderly men dressed like veterans sitting on a plane. Below the photo it says, "The real heroes are not in Hollywood." If you look a little more closely, it screams janky A.I. Which commercial airliner has five seats in a row next to the window? God knows what army they belong to: There are eagles, and stripes, but no stars.

ChatGPT makes an irresistible first impression. It's got a devastating sense of humour, a stunning capacity for dead-on mimicry, and it can rhyme like nobody's business. Then there is its overwhelming reasonableness. When ChatGPT fails the Turing test, it's usually because it refuses to offer its own opinion on just about anything. When was the last time real people on the internet declined to tell you what they really think?

If you want a glimpse of the future, check out how developers are using gpt-3. This natural language processor was trained on parameters ten times greater than its most sophisticated rival and can be used to answer questions and write astoundingly well. Creative professionals everywhere, from top coders to professional writers marvel at what gpt-3 can produce even now – in its relative infancy. Yesterday, New York Times tech columnist Farhad Manjoo wrote that the short glimpse the general public has taken of gpt-3 "is at once amazing, spooky, humbling, and more than a little terrifying. GPT-3 is capable of generating entirely original, coherent, and sometimes even factual prose. And not just prose -- it can write poetry, dialogue, memes, computer code, and who knows what else." Manjoo speculated on whether a similar but more advanced AI might replace him someday.

Manjoo stopped looking at news online for two months, and instead reverted back to getting real paper newspaper subscriptions. I won't give away the whole story, but one of his verdicts was that he felt as though reading an actual newspaper, he felt he was was getting some actual real news. Of course, if bots are your thing, you may want to know about the $13.5 million Series A round that Voicera just raised. Voicera's elevator pitch is that it wants to make it simpler to record meetings and pull out action items automatically using AI. It will do so by recording and creating a transcript of the meeting.

The future has arrived: cameras are gaining artificial intelligence (AI). Cameras can already connect to wi-fi, and have been an integral part of our smart devices for years, but they haven't had "minds" of their own. Even cameras that operate as part of large-scale surveillance systems have so far remained without their own AI functionality. Just this week, Google released its first AI-powered camera, Google Clips. The camera clips onto whatever you'd like and uses machine learning to automatically photograph what it "thinks" is interesting.

For all the talk about self-driving cars, it was a self-driving truck that may drive us a little faster into the future. This week, a big rig, carrying 2,000 cases of Budweiser beer, made a shipment in Colorado with no driver at the wheel. Anheuser-Busch calls it the world's first commercial delivery by a self-driving truck. Farhad Manjoo is a technology columnist for The New York Times, and he's also been in a driver-free truck. SIMON: What's it like to be in one of these trucks?

That's what I find myself asking my Amazon Echo voice-activated device more often than any other -- not aloud but on the inside, as the comedian Bobby Collins might say, because you don't really want a robotic presence in your house doubting your commitment to your mutual relationship. Alexa, you might know, is the female persona inhabiting the Echo, a Wi-Fi-enabled black cylinder about the size of a Pringles can, which you prime to answer your questions or perform services by invoking her name. I was given a $179 Echo last year as a gift, and a $49 Echo Dot -- a squashed down version endowed with a lousier speaker but equipped with Bluetooth capability -- as another gift for Father's Day. According to Amazon PR, these devices have ranked among the firm's most popular items. With Christmas approaching, Amazon has been pushing the Dot mercilessly as a gift item, even bundling it in six-packs.