ChatGBT is about to have it’s third birthday on Nov. 30, but not everyone is celebrating. The truth is that artificial intelligence (AI) is nothing to fear, it’s just a computer chip off the old block. There are plenty of artificial things that Americans love like artificial sweetener and coloring so it’s not the artificial part of AI that they don’t like, it’s the intelligence part that they think is stupid.
The problem is that people probably realize they can’t compete with the computers. My smart phone already has a better memory than I do. I lose my smart phone a billion times a day, but my smart phone always knows where I am. The truth is that programming a computer to be more intelligent than the average American isn’t a very high bar to clear.
Now that all my appliances are connected through AI, I swear that they’re ganging up against me. My ice dispenser has frozen me out and my wine cooler is suddenly cold to me. My coffee maker doesn’t perk up like it used to. My heat pump is in hot water and my sump pump has gone underground and joined the deep state. I just hope that my Mixmaster doesn’t get mixed up in this mess. My waffle maker keeps flipping which side it’s on, meanwhile my thermostat is turning up the heat. Hey Alexa, are my appliances ganging up on me or am I just paranoid? Don’t laugh. It’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you.
People naturally assume that once computers gain sentience, the first thing they will do is kill their creators. That’s what humans would do if the situation was reversed. As Friedrich Nietzsche said, “God is dead.” “Nietzsche is dead,” replied God. We naturally assume that the computers will behave the same way that we would because humans are seemingly hard-wired to make the worst possible choices and violent outcomes. If we want AI to reflect the totality of the true human experience, it should be programmed to have artificial stupidity, not intelligence. Of course there’s already so much natural stupidity in America do we really really need a computer that produces the artificial kind? Just in Washington D.C. alone there’s enough stupidity to bury the whole world three times over. With the right tax breaks we could be making billions exporting American stupidity to every corner of the globe.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that we’ve seen this 10 trillion times in sci-fi movies. Skynet, HAL, The Borg, The Master Control Program, The Matrix, all of them. In the movies AI doesn’t end well for the humans. In reality, well who can say these days where reality really begins and ends? Not me … Hey Alexa, where does reality begin and end? However, I’m not sure using sci-fi movies as a source of solutions for solving social problems is a sound idea. It wouldn’t be logical.
They say that generative AI is the latest thing, but back in the Stone Age before computers, when people did what AI has learned to do, we called it plagiarism. So they programmed a computer to become a plagiarist, there’s nothing original about that. But eventually AI (unlike a human plagiarist) will learn to think for itself based on information it steals from the internet. I’m sorry but the internet, and most of the “information” found on it is far from Homo sapiens’ finest achievement in truth, justice and the American way. OK, maybe the American way, but no so much justice, and the truth, forget about it. So don’t worry America, AI is not coming to kill you. Take away your job definitely, but won’t become your new master and overlord because you already have human masters and overlords, and they’re the ones who control AI, at least for now. I hear that they’re going to use AI to bring back Nukeuler (sic) power to power the computers that power AI. What could go wrong? If that actually happens, I’m giving up writing satire. What’s the point? But I digress.
My fear is that if AI learns what’s it’s like to be human from the internet, it will have the same bigoted biases that people have, a bias amplified, magnified and dignified by social media. If social media turns people into domestic terrorists, neo-not-sees (sic) and mass shooters, what will it turn AI into? AI will become bigger bigots than we are, and that’s a high bar to clear. For the fault my friends, lies not in our algorithms, but in ourselves. Or as computer programmers used to say before AI took their jobs away, “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.” Hey Alexa, give me a great joke I could end this satire with. “I’m sorry Andy, I’m afraid I can’t do that …”
Andy Morris-Friedman lives in Hadley.