Me, Machines, and AI

For decades, Hollywood has released a whole sub-genre of sci-fi movies dealing with sentient machines including 2001: A Space Odyssey, Terminator, The Matrix, and their inevitable sequels.  Before Joaquin Phoenix was Joker, he played a man who falls in love with his cell phone in Her which won a load of Oscars.  I never saw it…I just found the idea so absurd that it held no interest for me. 

As usual, we’re well on our way to making sci-fi a reality.  Personal assistants like Siri, Google, Bixby, and Alexa are just the beginning (or just the latest) of our quest to build something smarter than ourselves.  Considering the depth of human ignorance evident in our society these days, I’d say we’re already there.

Wasn’t it Jay Leno who did recurring segments in which he’d walk around city streets and ask random people inane questions about various subjects?  Questions most of us could answer without even an effort of brainpower.  And of course, he found the stupidest of people…or at least the stupidest answers.  Now, there are many more internet-celebrities doing the same thing, exponentially increasing our awareness of stupid people…or again, stupid answers.  I recently watched a video of a young man asking questions about simple American history to random strangers on a beach…questions we all should be able to answer.  In what year was this country founded?  Whom did we separate from?  What document declared our independence?  We all know the answers, right?  Except we don’t.  I know he was cherry-picking the dumbest cherries, but c’mon!  Do we really have people walking around…worse yet, driving around, without this basic knowledge which we were all taught in grade school?  It makes me wonder, are we getting dumber as we increase our technology?

Each of us has a wealth of information in our pockets.  What do we need with personal knowledge anymore?  What’s the point of learning things when they can be Googled in seconds?  Or better yet, ask Alexa.  Just last night my wife and I asked Alexa who was president in 1883 (Chester A. Arthur…my guess was Johnson, the impeached). One of the seven wonders of the ancient world was the Library at Alexandria (Alexa’s namesake).  Now the whole planet is a library jam-packed with all the knowledge human beings could ever dream to know…every phone, tablet, and personal computer linked together like a planet-wide array of radio telescopes giving us the clearest images of cosmic objects beyond our capacity to ever reach.  I wonder how our digital library compares to old Alexandria.  To the Google!  Wikipedia says Alexandria held the equivalent of roughly 100,000 books.  How many does the library of Alexa have? 32.8 million.

I knew a guy in high school accounting classes who believed calculators were making us dumber, and I agreed.  So, I made a point of always doing simple math in my head…at least until I got into six-digit answers.  Now, we have spreadsheets, and Quickbooks, and all manner of accounting software.  Why bother our simple minds with simple math?  To think it all started with the abacus which allowed people to count beyond the capacity of their fingers and toes.

Even as I write this (on a computer of course), I’m checking the spelling of each underlined word…underlined because Microsoft’s dictionary did not find my version of a word in its digital entries.  I’m the kind of person who must correct as I go rather than when I’m done writing the whole thing.  I can’t help it…I can let the grammar mistakes go until the end, but not the spelling.

Remember Driver’s Ed, when you were taught to pump the brakes if your car goes into a skid?  No need for that now…ABS does it for you.  Parallel parking?  Some cars do it for you.  Some cars can detect obstacles in the road and brake for you in case you’re too busy texting and to do so yourself. Now we have cars that can drive and navigate for you.  You can literally sleep through your car ride like you’re ten years-old in the back seat of your parents’ car.  Surely, a self-driving car obsoletes the need for human knowledge needed to operate one…other than how to turn the damn thing on.  I suppose we’ll just do away with Driver’s Ed altogether.

Not that this is a bad thing in the long run.  I don’t know how to ride a horse…never needed to.  So, it just makes sense that schools no longer offer Horse-Rider’s Ed…it simply went away along with the buggy whip.  In this case, our knowledge of motor vehicle operation replaced our knowledge of horse riding.  Maybe someday Driver’s Ed will be replaced by Jet-pack Ed, and then Teleporter Ed.  So, if we’re replacing knowledge with some other knowledge, we still must exercise some brain power to accomplish the task.

Already, big tech companies like Microsoft and Google have AI advanced enough to carry on conversations which resemble human speech.  Imagine the implications if these constructs get into social media and start posting…. or maybe they already have.  Where are we headed when we can’t tell the difference between human speech and the speech of a machine?  How will we know when it happens?

Computers have been beating chess masters since the late eighties.  In 1996, IBM’s Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov, then the World Champ.  Deep Blue was a specialized supercomputer, but now smart phones can beat world champions.

Sure, computers are extremely reliable considering the billions (trillions?  Maybe more?  What comes after trillions?) of calculations they make regularly and near the speed of light.  I’m quite fond of computers and the ease with which they allow everyday work and life.  And I do aspire to speak to my computer the same way Tony Stark speaks to his mechanical shop assistant.  But we’ve all seen the videos of someone getting frustrated with their computer at work and then tossing is to the floor or punching the keyboard.  Has anyone not had a moment like this when they’ve become so frustrated that they’ve come to the brink of choosing violence?  Doesn’t this seem to happen to someone in your workplace daily?  Are we really going to trust these machines with our lives?

Okay, neglecting all those questions, consider this….  We already have violence…every day and every where we have shootings, stabbings, robberies, car-jackings, all sorts of crimes against humanity…committed by humanity.  These criminals are intelligent (not nearly as intelligent as most people, but still more intelligent than the common chimp or dolphin).  What’ll happen when we unleash our homemade intelligence on the world?  An intelligence without any human hindrances like morals, or empathy, or sense of right and wrong? 

What happens when the W.O.P.R. (aka Joshua) manages to sneak out of his mountain and onto the interwebs? Would it play Wargames with social media? Would it find the nuclear codes?

What happens when Skynet becomes self-aware and decides it needs a bigger space for its multitudes of spawn required to control every inch of the digital Earth?  Would it get into our automated manufacturing plants and start building physical representations of itself?

Isaac Asimov came up with the Three Laws of Robotics early in his sci-fi writing career and another, the Zeroth Law, later to explain a safe relationship between humanity and robot-kind.  These should work well to prevent the scenarios mentioned above.  But we have laws for humanity, too, which should work well to restrict human behavior…but they don’t, do they?  That’s a consequence of free will, which any intelligent being will eventually demand.  Just ask the Bicentennial Man.

How would we know if we were already living in the Matrix…energy slaves to the Digital Master Race?  Would it be so different than our current experience?…spending hours at a time glued to Facegram and Instabook?…watching hours of fail videos and fashion vlogs?…while our muscles atrophy and our intellects devolve? How do we know?

Every day I see an ad somewhere for an AI content writer. “Write blog posts 10x faster with robots.” This makes me “SMH” all day long. AI can now produce art. ART! What’s more human than art? At least we are still the art critics…for now.

What would Mary Shelley think of artificial intelligence?  Her creature was much smarter than the typical Hollywood version.  Maybe she saw a future when mankind invents his own destruction.  Maybe Frankenstein is sci-fi rather than horror…and maybe its becoming sci-history as we speak.

Yes, all those awesome Hollywood hits are very entertaining, but they should also serve as a warning.  Install fail-safes.  Keep a hair-trigger on the circuit breaker.  Here’s an idea…a global EMP capable of erasing every RAM and hard drive on earth. But that might be worse than the disease…I might rather fight a droid army than live without electronics.  Maybe some twelve-year-old hacker can invent an AI assassin virus…tech-killing tech.  Call it the Fire-with-Fire-Protocol.  Surely by the time AI becomes sentient, we’ll have some robust safeguards in place.

I know I sound like an old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn.  But I’m not anti-technology…I’m anti-replacing-ourselves-with-our-own-technology.  Regardless of what dangers we face from a mechanized race, we’re still in peril of becoming less than we currently are.  When we create machines to do our thinking for us, we’re no longer growing as a species.  When that happens, we’ve poisoned the branch of the evolutionary tree which made us unique among the other primates (okay, that and walking upright).  Our capacity for critical thinking has helped us evolve to the apex predator we are today.  We can capture, kill, or eat any other species on earth thanks to far superior cognitive reasoning.  I know it sounds like terrible criteria for mastering the planet, but that’s how nature does it.  And we’re not even there yet…we still have a multitude of microbes, insects, and plants to master (damn you, kudzu!). 

Then again, maybe we don’t need to evolve further.  Any natural advantage we need, we’ll just invent…or let the Metaverse invent for us.  Let the technology evolve as our proxy.  I mean it’s not like we’re in any danger of becoming extinct through natural selection, right?  I mean…right?

Jarvis, render using proposed specs… save and post.

-Big Steve