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An unasked, much less answered, question in the rush to ‘join the AI revolution’ is: Why? (Let alone what it means or even is. Or, come to that, the substance of what it actually does.)
Have we ceased to desire original thought or human things, made or done by a real person? Or have we just forgotten how to actually see and pay attention to what’s in front of us, how to focus – how to think and do and be – even just how to be human?
Modern life is bewildering enough, I know. But maybe it doesn’t have to be. Maybe we don’t have to be so disconnected from each other. Maybe we can remember our own, and each other’s, dignity. Maybe we can start to see the person in front of us again. And, who knows, maybe we’ll actually begin to feel better and more alive once more.
My favourite joke about AI (after Terry Pratchett’s ‘real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time’) is ‘No, thank you, I prefer to do my own thinking.’ Except, I’m only half joking.
The whole rush to AI is a symptom of a world where people have forgotten how to do their own thinking, how to pay attention and be alive to the world around us, and most importantly how to make our own decisions and think again when something isn’t working.
Look at the world around us, after all. Do you see things going better, or even well? Are we happier than we used to be? Or are we sadder and lonelier, searching for meaning in all the wrong places?
The most important things in life can’t be seen through the screen of a smartphone, streamed, ordered at a single click, or swiped right on – and the business of work and life can’t be done or decided by artificial intelligence. It needs the real human kind. Otherwise what’s the point?
The computer-generated ads babble about ‘the AI era’. Well, what about a human era? A time for adventures and heroes and happy endings. A time for truth. A time to be glad that we are alive.
It's got to beat the alternative.
Discussion (8)
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My only experience using AI is chatbots/LLMs, in whatever version Brave uses. It is an idiot. These things are aggregators that seem to scrape the most common info on the web and dump it in my lap. But what is good about that, is it forces me to use very precise language in my searches, and pushing back on the answers it gives can lead to real comedy. Once I was doing some research and asked for a comparative list of some sort, and after it had been grinding away for minutes I typed, "No offense, but I'm no longer concerned about AI taking over the world," to which it replied, "No offense taken. If I can't create a simple list, taking over the world is a stretch."
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Reminds me of the famous Punch cartoon of the Daleks at the bottom of some stairs: "Well this certainly [messes up] our plan to conquer the Universe."
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Consider that the gurus of computation and AI aren't sure there is a difference at all between machine "intelligence" and human intelligence, or between human consciousness and machine consciousness. Daniel Dennett asserts that human self awareness, consciousness, is an illusion. Alan Turing thought that machine and human intelligence were the same. THe current AI developers (at least some of them) are agnostic about whether there is any difference between human intelligence and machine intelligence. All of these beliefs have arisen with no understanding at all of what human consciousness is or how it occurs. It is assumed to be strictly mechanical causal, an epiphenomenon of nerve function. The AI developers use a lot of mathematical tricks to train neural networks to mimic human speech, or SVM tricks to sort data, fancy math tricks that are very useful but hardly qualify as conscious. Anthropic developers are "spooked out" at the function of their neural networks but these are hardly conscious, rather function unpredictably because they are set up to function unpredictably. Their function is exactly what you would expect from such a system.
I would ask, if AI is so great, why does it take vast arrays of chips in massive data centers using vast quantities of energy to mimic the function of something that has a volume of 1200-1500 ccs and functions on 500 calories a day?
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There is far more evidence to the contrary than there is for any form of intelligence.
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What is ironic to me is all the advice I get to live a calmer and longer and more real life comes with the admonishment to put away my phone. You do know that if we all just put away our phones (and desktops and laptops and tablets) you would be talking to the ether and no one would hear your voice.
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