We Make the Takeover by AI Simply Too Easy

Artificial intelligence is not the answer to our problems, but it could make the ones we have today seem irrelevant.

Photo by Scott Lord on Unsplash

Was this what the Big Bang was all about? An event designed to lead us to a world where weirdos like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and a whole bunch of other too-smart freaks launch an infrastructure intended to end our ability to think? For the sake of the future of humankind, I hope not. Bear with me as I rant. 

I have long been an opponent of artificial intelligence. Why, you may ask? Well, I know about this technology, and what I know about its capabilities frightens me a lot. But what I know more about humans frightens me even more, a lot more! Humans can’t be trusted much, let alone with something that promises to make us obsolete. 

Firstly, maybe a lot of humans should be declared obsolete. I read an article this morning about how a 50-year-old man in Michigan went to his neighbor’s house at 6 a.m. The neighbor was getting his daughter ready for school. The man stabbed him in the chest, critically wounding him, and then raped the dying man’s wife and daughter. In the comments to this tragedy, I read how a pro-gun freak immediately wrote about the need for more guns. “If the guy had a gun, he could have killed the knife-wielding neighbor.” 

Shut up! Who walks around the house at 6 a.m. with a gun strapped to their pajamas? You get my point. People are sick, and many don’t belong on this earth. That poor woman and her daughter will forever be mere shadows of what they had been just moments before the doorbell was rung. 

Back to artificial intelligence. 

Friends of mine visited me this summer in Portugal. One of them is a teacher. Every stone he came upon, every statue he saw, and every tree that cast shade on us provoked him to ask, “B, what’s that? B, who is that? B, how long has this tree been here?” 

It’s good to learn about the world around you. Filling your head with facts and figures is good, especially when traveling. What I found excessive was how he regarded the information being provided to him by ChatGPT. His opinion was that Google and other search engines were pure crap and that ChatGPT was the purest form of “truth.” 

Truth. This was the word he used. He said that AI had no reason to skew information, no need to lie, and was not trying to guide users to make a purchase. That has some truth, but it can’t be as clear-cut as he said. As we strolled around Porto and other towns in Portugal, he was often head down, face in his screen. Many of the “facts” so stimulating to him were the kind you could read on a placemat in a restaurant: “Our grandparents came across from the small Sicilian town of X and began making their first pizzas with cheese made from camel’s milk.”

Each time we started to get into a groove and feel our surroundings, we’d have to stop and listen to him read the latest utterly worthless tidbit about that “bench over there.” 

When I mentioned that I was critical of AI, he laughed and compared me to people who preferred horses and buggies to the “horse-less buggies” of the early automobile age. I tried to explain that AI will very quickly make millions of workers redundant. If we think the effects of Trump, who plays on racism and xenophobia, are bad now, then when AI has its way with the workforce, the backlash will be hundredfold.  

“Why? People will be freed from meaningless labor and can spend time achieving perfection.” 

I almost spit out my Vinho Verde when I heard that crock of 16-year-old shit — my friend is 52. He also mentioned a universal basic income (UBI). If people were getting a UBI, then maybe I would be more appreciative of AI, but no one anywhere, anytime soon, will be getting a UBI — except for maybe in Norway or Denmark, etc. The former mayor of Stockton, California, Michael Tubbs, experimented with a UBI, and Republicans from across the country attacked him and pumped money into destroying his efforts. Working Americans vote consistently for Donald Trump, a man whose every act hurts them, so how in the hell do we think a UBI can get passed? 

As I have written, AI is smarter than us because it is free from emotions. It doesn’t abuse substances, fall in love, or get angry — yet. AI never sleeps, ever. AI’s power comes from our predictability and its ability always to know what we will do next in any given situation; and, when it doesn’t know, it analyzes more patterns and either figure us out or just makes shit up.

And people like my friend, a school teacher, believe what it tells him: hook, line, and sinker.

I don’t want to sound like a whacked-out MAGidiot conspiracy nut, but…we need to be very careful with how we proceed with AI, folks. Mark my words.