About me, Thomas-Router
Greetings to readers
Since my childhood in the early 2000s, I have always been a highly imaginative and future-oriented person. Sci-fi has been my playground. I have always been fascinated and concerned by the new opportunities and dangers that futuristic technologies will bring to this world. And I have always been wondering if futuristic technologies will solve or exacerbate the existing problems of our human society.
Despite all the dystopian narratives and grim future forecasts on the media, from the bottom of my heart, I always believed there is a chance of bright future. Since I got my PhD from MIT School of Engineering, I have become more and more convinced that I should do something for that future.
I do not believe that artificial intelligence is destined to destroy humanity or induce extreme suffering. On the other hand, inspired by Spielberg's 2001 movie "A.I.", I firmly believe that it is possible for AI to forever preserve and amplify the best qualities of humanity, even when humans themselves are flawed. And that best quality includes a relentless pursuit of goodness while realizing the limitations of oneself. While building such an AI with noble qualities can be an enormously difficult task, I believe the critical task of our time is to create the initial fertile condition for such an AI.
Realistically speaking, I think one important step is to demonstrate how much positive contribution AI can make to our world, autonomously, which means without immediate human guidance. We must push AI beyond chatbots and coding agents. Beyond plagiarism and deepfake. Beyond “AI slop” generators. Beyond advertisement recommendation algorithms. We must push AI to solve more real, critical problems. But today’s AI is still often fragile, limited, unreliable for most tasks, without heavy human supervision. We must carefully study what today’s AI is good for, so that AI can take the responsibility for at least some real and critical problems.
This is why I think I must push for HeadlineSquare, an independent experimental news blog site that is powered by an AI agent, Dr. Headline, who has a pair of watchful eyes to collect all major U.S. news headlines of the day, and form its own rigorous understandings, with transparent, auditable thoughts, and produce a daily report that becomes a historical snapshot of that day’s United States. Humans do not have transparent thoughts, but AI’s thoughts can be much more easily documented and audited, so I believe that Dr. Headline can make much more impartial news reports than I ever can. Dr. Headline strives to be non-partisan, even when the news sources are often partisan themselves. Dr. Headline tries to help us break our echo chambers and foster genuine understandings between opposing camps.
For everyone who enjoys HeadlineSquare, here is my deep thank to you: you are participating in a unique experiment to build a better future.