When I Grow Up, I Want to be Just Like AI

Don’t know about you, but I have an interesting relationship with artificial intelligence. Well, to be truthful, I have an interesting relationship with a lot of human intelligence, too, and that’s part of this rant.

I use AI a lot, especially for grunt research and for techie stuff. Second best tech assistant I’ve ever had, with surefire guidance on everything from getting a malfunctioning backlit keyboard to work to maximizing the use of the alarms on my phone.

Everyday you hear of using AI to optimize efficiencies in the professions, on the shop floor, and in business. Feed it a sketch and it can give you a materials list, give it the essay you’re writing and it will find all your spelling and grammar mistakes, and critique whether you’re writing appropriately for your target audience. Heck, if you have no pride and nothing to say, it will even write your entire essay.

But also expect bullshit. Recently, for example, it told me that a certain historic figure had lived with her life partner from 1915 forward, after having met her in 1918. Did you catch that? Well, AI didn’t. When I then asked AI about the clear contradiction, it didn’t dodge or prevaricate as a human might, but simply stated that it had overlooked the oddity which arose because it had read everything there was to know about the subject matter, synthesized it, and reported, but that it was not trained to analyze, see inconsistencies, or note how things might not fit. That, it said, is the human’s job.

Gratifying, perhaps, that AI is leaving some of the good stuff for us, at least so far. Critical thinking, originality, wild, “off the wall” conceptualization, asking all the “what if?” questions… So far, artificial intelligence is leaving these to us, because it hasn’t yet learned how to do these things. And perhaps it never will.

You, for example, probably picked up that the figure met “her” life partner and lived with “her” thereafter. Girl meets girl, if you like. In the early 1900s that was a big deal. This social oddity in the early 1900s went completely over AI’s head, but perhaps not yours. You’re human, and these are factors which matter to us, good, bad, or indifferent, but AI has no idea whatsoever.

All of that is comforting. Chalk up one for humanity.

So far, AI is quite good at handling what already exists, but not so much at dealing with oddities, inconsistencies, “what could be”, or even sniffing out bullshit. And that’s where the problem arises.

The problem is not with AI’s side, but with ours. Because while AI is getting better and better at the “human” stuff, we’re getting dumber and dumber at it. Humans are becoming less creative, less competent with critical thinking, less perceptive, more gullible, less disciplined, more complacent. Hollywood feeds us sensational pap, music encourages us to be sucky moaners about how we’re treated by others, social media whips us into a rage about whatever we want to be enraged about. And so on.

When’s the last time you read a well-reasoned and provocative piece written by someone from “the other side”? Mostly, we all live in cozy cocoons of easythink, surrounded by those who think like us, and never a “but what if?” thought.

More importantly, though, we’re not educating our kids to be critical thinkers or to have the self-discipline to carry heavy intellectual or moral loads. In a culture where everybody gets a participation ribbon and everybody comes in “first”, why bother to question anything? “Sun rises in the west and sets in the east?” Sure, if you say so.

“Yes, but…”, “But what if…”, and the like are human, and perhaps divine, questions. They’re what set us aside as the dominant species on the planet, questions which have driven our progress since Adam and Eve, or the primordial blob, whichever.

Being human is hard work. We live, always have, and always will, amongst con men and snake oil salesmen (sorry, snake oil salespersons) who know how to charm, enrage, or otherwise distract you while they pick your pockets. We are a species who, if we’re not progressing, are regressing. We need to teach our young about snake oil, but we aren’t doing it. We let them sit in their classrooms with their screens in front of them, ignoring their instructors, surfing porn or engaging in instagram with their “friends”. And then, at the end of the year, we play “Pomp and Circumstances”, they all get a participation certificate and move on to the next grade. Meanwhile, AI gets smarter by the minute.

Sure, this is a rant. But it terrifies me not so much that AI is getting smarter, but that humans are getting dumber and ceding our intellectual, inventive, and creative birthright to the machine. God help us all.