Imagine you’re walking through your neighborhood and a four-foot-tall robot walks up beside you. It greets you by name, remembers your favorite coffee order, and offers to carry your groceries. You’ve never seen it before. Should you trust it?
That question isn’t science fiction anymore. Machines are getting smart. Large language models (LLMs) already contain vast amounts of information. They know about the physical world, human behaviors, our history, the nature of human jobs, and the behaviors of our pets. This stored information allows LLMs and other AIs to write books, make us laugh, fix computer code, get perfect scores on medical licensing exams, and file our taxes. LLMs, when given a physical body, are starting to autonomously navigate cities and hospitals, can open doors and get i