Dear Uncle Sam, You have been sorely misinformed about AI. Even the name itself has been used to mislead you! Artificial Intelligence does not exist today. Whi

Dear Uncle Sam, You have been sorely misinformed about AI. Even the name itself has been used to mislead you! Artificial Intelligence does not exist today. While new systems may be "intelligent" in their designs, none of them is "an intelligence". Artificial Intelligence has been the pursuit of Computer Science since the earliest days of software design, back when the AI department at Bell Labs developed Programming Languages. What is called "AI" today is no more than the newest efforts in that pursuit. Despite the excitement at these newer efforts, the goal that is AI is as mysterious as it ever was. So what's new? Inference Models. These allow computers to navigate ambiguous data. This was entirely impossible before, and is only somewhat possible today. While computers do not get completely stuck on ambiguity the way they used to, they are still unable to conclusively resolve that ambiguity. They can only be trained to guess. With careful training on very large datasets, some impressive results have been obtained. Unfortunately, those impressive results are always closely tied to embarrassing mistakes. This is a feature of contemporary inference models. The goal in mind is to perform this process well enough to have a novel and useful system. Many believe that once a model is big enough and trained well enough that it will become reliably more accurate. There is no conclusive evidence that is the case. While they are often introduced as a "limitation", behaviors like "overconfidence" and "hallucinations" are features of these systems. In order to remove a feature from a system, a new system must be invented. In the mean time, let's consider what does exist, rather than get lost in our own dreams. So what should you be worried about? Contemporary inference models are powerful enough to create convincing results. What does that mean for the people of the United States? We need to recognize the reality in front of us: people can tell lies. Data alone is never a reliable source of information. This has always been true, but the inherent difficulty in storytelling has made some lies impractical to tell. As technology improves, so does each person's ability to tell a story. We have all watched the journalistic integrity of our world suffer at the hands of Social Media, and at the failure of large corporations to moderate content. At best, people have grown to distrust scientific discovery and leadership; and at worst, untamed hate speech has lead to genocide. So what can we do about it? Readers need to be able to differentiate content, not by its substance, but by its source. The good news is that this has been a solved problem for 50 years. All that an author needs to attach their identity to their writing, is to provide readers their unique public key and a signature of their work. Unfortunately, the best tools to do this, including GPG, are very technical and difficult for the layman to use. It should be the priority of the United States, for the sake of national security, to improve this landscape by creating (or motivating the creation of) easy-to-use public-key encryption software.