The Generosity Project

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Two Out of Five Stars

I don’t dislike the extended architecture that is AI as much as I dislike the ruthlessness and thoughtlessness with which it is applied. The Borg have apparently assimilated Silicon Valley and will continue to assimilate the rest of the nation and then the world. The Borg Collective will have priority when dividing resources since the Collective will be controlling the programs and the companies that determine who gets what and when.

Outside of Star Trek references, the discomfort many of us have with such a heavy-handed embrace of a saturation-level technology has less to do with the technology than it has to do with our distrust of our fellow humans. We know the failings of our species. History is filled with warnings about those who possess great power and about those who covet it as well. I wouldn’t trust any human, or human enterprise, with the power to destroy worlds. Yet here we are again. We keep creating instruments of power but we rarely use them for good despite the marketing department’s empty words about how the new thing can improve lives everywhere.

Lord Acton wrote it concisely, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

The power involved in launching and populating the world’s systems with AI is beyond my comprehension. There is an enormous level of temptation for those involved. I distrust the cutthroat ethics, and the people using them, of this push on a visceral level. It’s not a philosophical argument being debated between the scholars and sceptics. The proponents of AI have excluded the philosophers they didn’t agree with. They have ignored the warnings of history and they appear willing to sacrifice others, meaning us, on the way to reaching their goals. It is a cousin to the scorched earth territory left by private equity. Macro economics of entire communities are traded against the future dreams of the few. They’re on a gambler’s high with the risk and riding the margins but the costs will be paid by those not invited to the after party.

I don’t trust Elon. I don’t trust Peter. I don’t trust Sam. I don’t trust Mark. I wouldn’t hire them as employees. I certainly wouldn’t trust them with my family. I think they don’t trust me either. They have read history, or at least they watched a video about parts of it, so they know just as all powerful people know that their predominance won’t last forever and that they have friends of convenience. The type of friends that just happen to be on a plane leaving the country when someone needs their help. People who travel in the upper circles of money and power are often friends in name only. They’re only there for the opportunities.

One of my favorite stories growing up was written by Roger Zelazny. It is called ‘Roadmarks’. There were two characters that were books of poetry, Flowers & Leaves. I imagined AI would resemble something like them. Samuel Delaney wrote some amazingly detailed futures blending technology and humanity. Science Fiction authors have created brilliant, and sometimes gritty, futures but so far AI has not risen to those possibilities. It has instead been co-opted by a two-bit hustler on some dirty street corner that offers us a game. Before us is a table with three small cups on it and they are betting that we can’t prove they’re cheating while they live stream the game for views.

I asked AI how would AI stop AI from consuming resources that humans need to survive. The answer wasn’t groundbreaking but it did give me hope in that the way communities are limiting data centers, rewriting laws, keeping power grids in public hands, defending water rights and fighting back locally are the things that will make a difference. AI is ours. No matter what the tech bros want us to believe, AI cannot function without our consent. We control the resources AI needs and if we keep that control, we have a say. The Chat GPTs and the rest of them have been working quietly to further their own plans while we were sleeping. But now that we’ve noticed that they use too much water, pollute the air around them and push power grids towards instability, we can stand our ground and make the future a future for all of us.

3 responses to “Two Out of Five Stars”

  1. David Avatar
    David

    Isaac Asimov’s Robot series (the books not the movies) explored the combined human / AI world, although the term AI hadn’t been invented then. My take, after talking to a number of experts in the field, is that AI is very artificial and not at al intelligent. What do you do when you have nothing that needs to be done? Read a book, watch a movie, go for a walk, chat to someone – whatever you want. What does an AI do when it is not being used? Nothing. It just stops processing.
    Rather AI is a very powerful pattern-matching technology able to absorb far more information that a human mind and detect patterns that we can’t see. For example using AI to scan satellite images of the area around the Nazca Lines and finding hundreds of new diagrams was promoted as AI outdoing humans, but the James Webb telescope seeing space as humans could never see it was promoted as a great tool for astronomers. In both cases they are just tool.
    The real issue is the impact AI, as a transformational technology will have on our lifestyle in many different ways

    Reply
    1. S.Bechtold Avatar
      S.Bechtold

      Thank you for this response. It is already on its way to transforming society and our lives. Those impacts on society and our lives are the part that concern me. I started my tech journey making semiconductor chips back in 1982. The labs were rudimentary. we didn’t wear clean suits etc. I was placing silicon wafers onto openwork quartz boats and loading them into doping tubes like I was making pizzas. My only protective gear was a pair of high temp oven mitts. Etching the disks in open top beakers boiling on the equivalent of a stovetop while standing right next to a tank of liquid nitrogen. It was physically dangerous work and not working in a clean room environment led to inconsistencies in the chips. The AI push reminds me of that era. Doing things the fastest way while trying to take huge bites and not knowing until it’s maybe too late if we’ve bitten off more than we can chew. For example, Data Centers are using evaporative cooling in many cases rather than creating more efficient, less resource hungry systems like the cooling towers for reactors. There are always unintended consequences when we move forward quickly. We rarely take society and its ability to accept and incorporate change into consideration when we’re racing to a goal. The point of technology is to serve humanity in some fashion. Even if it’s only seen by some through the myopic view of material profit, the reasons for its existence are to further humans lives on this planet. More of the humans need to be involved in the decision-making because the inherent tradeoffs, both good and bad, with change will always be felt. A powerful tool, when misunderstood and used for less than its potential, is not only a waste of resources but the not knowing and understanding of its capabilities can lead to dangerous outcomes.

      Reply
      1. David Avatar
        David

        That was a fascinating background you had. I got as far as multilayer PCB design and etch but then drifted into software as that was where the work was here in New Zealand / Aotearoa, and have done everything from assembly-level programming on IBM mainframes to, designing public-facing web site design, and most recently, trying to convince senior management in a government education department that they to understand where the future of education is going, what the department’s role in it will be, and what the staff will need to do before approving the system architect’s design for a complete replacement of the IT environment based on the existing 20 year old model. Unfortunately that was too much hard work for them, so I retired.

        I am not concerned about AI taking over the world in a humanistic sense, rather that the ability for an AI engine to be used to search almost unlimited amounts of data about each of us and report target behaviours. For example , a camera in a car focussed on the driver monitoring to alert them if they are falling asleep (clever and useful user of AI within the car) also storing the feed online without user control (a political decision), and that feed being being monitored by the traffic authority’s AI and systems to send you a ticket for texting while driving.

        I think I will go and sit in the bush for a while to get some privacy.

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