It is surprising how confusing things can seem to sort themselves out under the spell of smoke rising into the air from the embers of a late-summer campfire. Take Artificial Intelligence, for example.
When Uncle Bob was a kid, he used a phone that was a wooden box attached to the wall with a crank handle on the side. On the other side was a cradle that held an earpiece on a cord. On the front was a black cone that you talked into.
When you wanted to make a call, you picked up the earpiece, cranked the handle and waited for the operator to answer by saying, “Operator.” You then told her the number of the person you wanted to call, which was the name of an exchange followed by three digits. “Operator, give me Bluebell 123.”
There was a good chance you knew the operator’s name. She would plug you and the other users on your party line into the right socket on her switchboard and, “Bob’s your uncle,” as they say, we were connected! When his phone rang with two longs and a short, Bob knew the call was for him. Privacy depended on the politeness of the others on the party line and on one’s Spidey Sense to detect eavesdropping. The operator knew all and hopefully told little.
Given this background in high tech, who better than Uncle Bob Loblaw to fathom the digital world in general and AI in particular? After all, the basics are still the basics: phone, operator, connections, numbers, telephone company, users and eavesdroppers. Right?
Musing over his campfire, he remembers when the smooth sounds coming from his record player were replaced by sounds made up of digital bursts. On, off, on, off at such a high speed that the off spaces became unnoticeable. It sounded exactly like music, but was it really? He still thinks he can feel the difference between music that comes to him on sine waves and music that presents itself in the form of bytes. He still prefers his vinyl records and enjoys the snob appeal of the word “audiophile.”
He believes that what he sees by way of waves and photons in the real world is better than the pixelated bursts flashing into his brain courtesy of operators like Bill and Elon, and telephone companies like Meta. Knuckling down to the hard work of campfire musing, he wonders what you would call someone who chooses the smoothness of reality over the harshness of pixels. A Realophile? A Wave Head? A Luddite, for sure!
He well remembers what it felt like on Dec. 31, 1999, when the world held its breath, half expecting planes to fall from the sky, power grids to fail and the stock market to crash when the calendar clicked over to Jan. 1, 2000, and all of our computers died of Y2K disease.
Perhaps that was the moment when we came face to face with just how vulnerable we are when we entrust our vital functions to a machine. Perhaps it was a moment when we still had something of a choice with respect to the price we would agree to pay for convenience and efficiency. More likely, he thinks, the choice and the point of no return had already been reached.
In any case, the world breathed a collective sigh of relief, sending Henny Penny scurrying back to her chicken coop in disgrace. The sky didn’t fall and we proceeded to build a virtual network as fragile as a spider web in a hurricane and willingly bet our lives and our civilization on it. After all: Netflix, social media, populist politics and sports betting. Totally worth it!
The users of the old telephone knew each other. Unlike AI consumers, those human users had the privilege of making mistakes and correcting them. They could call back later and say, “I’m sorry,” and they could change course.
With AI, he figures, it’s as simple as “garbage in, garbage out.” Since AI makes decisions on the basis of existing knowledge, and since the evolutionary process that created our world did so by trial and error and by making “mistakes,” Bob realizes that AI has the potential to bring evolution to a grinding halt.
Adding AI to genetic tinkering, which already creates biological life forms we think we want while eliminating those we think are mistakes, seems to Bob to be not just a recipe but a prescription for disaster.
If the AI revolution is actually a radical counter-evolutionary heresy with the power to stop the diverse and endlessly evolving world in its tracks, who but oligarchic freaks with all the money and all the power in the world would be motivated to try to bring it about?
It’s enough to make an old curmudgeon want to piss on his campfire, he thinks as he struggles to his feet and unzips, surprised that he still remembers his old phone number and his fellow travellers on the party line.