Photo by NASA
Photo by NASA
Photo by NASA
Photo by NASA
A n d W o n d e r i n g
Humans wonder. That’s what we do. And we find things wondrous. No other life forms do that as far as we know. Lucky us.
These are some things I wonder about.
Some are right here.
Humanity Was Great While It Lasted
Others are out there.
GOODBYE?
Humanity Was Great While It Lasted
I want to regroup.
Almost everyday I get a message from a favourite service or vendor saying that the humans who used to serve customers are gone. AI crash-landed them, scattering their remains for miles and for foreseeable lifetimes. And every incident was entirely without there first having been a “hands up everyone who wants this” moment.
Five years ago I was outraged about the new centralised algorithmic telephone system of our local convenience store (Just Thinking AOS).
But that fear was nothing. Not compared with this change. It was analogous to a measly traffic build-up in the neighbourhood. Today it is more like the levelling of houses and schools and hospitals and shopping malls and garden centers and car dealerships and white-columned municipal buildings for miles around to make way for a five-tier multiplex highway and airstrip.
Actually it is worse. At least burying those neighbourhoods would not be the bombing of human interaction. Bulldozers annihilate things. Bots annihilate humans.
And as always, the people making life-imploding decisions like this for the rest of us did not ask the right questions first. Especially the powerful “Then what?” question.
Had they asked “Then what?,” I think they would then have had to answer these two questions with integrity and imagination, and without reference to money for a second:
1
How do we design AI so that all current human workers stay employed and get to work even more creatively, lucratively, pleasurably, and humanly?”
2
How do we design AI at every level so that it does not replace human contact for human customers?”
Even though it is seriously late in the AI development game, if the AI creations now under consideration cannot incorporate brilliantly the answers to those two questions, I think they should not be built.
I love humanity. I love that humans can think, actually think (weave knowledge and data and experience and logic and fantasy with feeling and love and empathy and intuitive accuracy). And given the size and complexity of our inexplicably magnificent, almost divine, brains, surely, surely we can figure out how, even at this late juncture, to enhance, not to replace, our thinking-feeling-loving selves with AI. Surely we, having invented it, can see that it is not we at all - it is not a thinking being – at all. Nor a loving being. Nor a feeling being. It is not a being, period. It is a scavenging thing. That is all. Fast. But, in true human terms, stupid.
And surely this true intelligence can figure out how not to shelve itself in order to elevate stupidity. Surely we can stop this unagreed, absurd interface of the “authentic “I” with the “artificial i.” I refuse to believe that we humans possess our humanity in order to create sub-humanity and then promote it as ultra-humanity.
No, there is no “goodbye” to humanity from me. There is only “good grief.” And then “good morning.” And then, I hope, “good job.”
Putting AI in its place, shall we rename it accurately, “Augmented Information?”
I could live with that.