Coop Scoop: How To Think The Wrong Way About AI
Who says robots running robots is more dangerous than humans running them?
June 6, 2023
By Marc Cooper
Making predictions today about how AI will or might change our lives makes about as much sense as sitting in a German café in 1455 with Gutenberg’s 42 page printed bible in hand and letting everybody know what you think about the future of printed language and text. The only person who would have been right would have said: “This is start of a new era in human history. Books will allow childhood and now children will NEED to go to school instead of work in the fields. It will invent mass literacy. It will give birth to the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment. It will greatly bolster what we call science and that, in turn, will challenge the moral precepts in the Gutenberg Bible. Indeed, it will produce democracy. And it will encourage atheism. And it will even produce Playboy, Hustler and dozens of bad novels every year.” Did anybody guess that back then?
It all came true. But unknowable at the time. Because here is the central, seminal fact about all technology…from hammers to Hummers to Chatbot. These technologies get introduced into society with little to no thought about how they will evolve and whether they will they create more problems than they solve. People in general, Americans in particular cling to two very dangerous myths about technology 1) That generally speaking more technology means more progress and 2) technological tools like all tools are “neutral” and their social worth depends on how we use them.
Completely wrong! Every technology has its own built-in bias, the place or form or use where it is best suited. Hammers are made to whack nails, not to be used as back scratchers. I imagine a nuclear warhead could be used to excavate a big hole in the ground but its optimum use is mass murder. That’s what it was made to do.
Let’s keep one uncomfortable truth very close to our heart as we speculate about the next 100 years and AI. The 20th Century moon landing will be about 15th on the list of accomplishments over those 100 years. The 20th Century will be remembered primarily as the first century of mechanized, industrial scale mass death. You can add up the balance sheet. Add up the wars and conflicts and the estimate is that 108 million died in the 1900’s wars. Some estimates say that is about 85% of the total war related deaths in all of previous human history though other estimates say it is more like 15-20%. Anyway, it was all about new technologies. Brits machine gunning the Sudanese, Europeans gassing each other in the trenches, Auschwitz, Zyklon B, napalm, cluster bombs, and the still-getting-justified nuclear attack on the Japanese civilian population that makes Russia’s current brutal raping of Ukraine look like a croquet match.
Yeah, we got cars and planes, TV and the web thanks to the boom in 20th century technology. They came accompanied by machine guns, 105mm howitzers, aircraft carriers, and those really “neutral” nuclear weapons (I have to note that Oliver Stone, who lost his mind some years ago under the influence of Vladimir Putin’s intoxicating armpit musk –even better than Fidel’s—has just put out a film arguing that only nuclear power can save the planet. Like, what could possibly go wrong with that?).
The Rise of the Age of Type – as brilliantly explained 35 years ago in Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death”—birthed literacy. We were forced to discern those symbols known as letters. Reading allowed us to think logically and rationally. And Print changed the very nature of knowledge itself. The smartest guy on the block was no longer the wizened oral story teller. The printing press eventually taught us that to be really smart, you had to be educated. You had to learn the skills of reading, writing, thinking, arguing and so on. This demand for education actually created what we now know as childhood itself. To be an adult in a literate society you needed to spend years acquiring the appropriate skills. Children were no longer miniature adults. They were, instead, adults-in-training.
This era of type evolved from the mid-15th century and began to degrade sharply in the mid-20th century when The Age of Television began to emerge. So who predicted in 1952 that TV would eventually be carriers not of Playhouse 90 or even a CBS White Paper investigation, but would find its peak 70 years later with Dr. Pimple Popper. If you think about it, TV theoretically could have evolved differently…like a big Kindle. The big networks could have scrolled literary text all day and night long on the home screen. Imagine Ozzie and Harriet finishing dinner and then sitting down in front of the tube console to continue reading War and Peace. But this would be a waste of the real power of TV that took decades to evolve…or devolve and to discover.
But from Day One, the boosters of TV knew immediately it was a visual medium. What it did best was transmit images. And those who ran the TV world soon figured out that dramatic, emotional pics work better than others. The pinnacle of great television is a live plane crash, a hundred times more compelling to watch than a live re-staging, say, of A Streetcar Named Desire.
While a good book requires the user to be a skilled reader (who presumably has spent 10-15 years developing the necessary skills), the only “skill” one needs to watch TV is to know how to sit still for hours. A three year old and a 30 year old can watch the same show as no TV show really requires any pre-knowledge or pre-requisites.
Television also hates exposition. And has taught the audience to be just as fickle. Words and explanations get in the way of fast-edited colorful images..as do subtitles or the now dreaded black and white version of anything. I might be wrong, I hope I am not, but I feel pretty secure in saying that TV after 75 years has finally found its optimum use…cheap, stupid, sensational entertainment. I suspect the only imminent major change in TV will be televised executions. Can you imagine the ratings?
Can you still learn anything on TV? Of course you can. But it will be a tiny bit of what you could have learned by reading. One study after another has shown that those who consumed the most TV news about the war in Iraq knew the least of those who followed news in general.
Now we are also 50 years into the Era of the Digital Revolution. My view is that this did not destroy TV culture, it merely absorbed it and redeployed it in its purest forms….what is Tik Tok if not the highest expression of evolved video culture? You don’t see a lot of 15 year olds scrolling their phones for the latest updates from Kyiv or from their school for that matter.
I went digital early. Bought a Kaypro II CPM computer in 1982 for $2700 with no hard disk and only 64k memory. If you had told me then that I would now have FOUR computers, six screens, an iPhone, a Kindle, and that even my hoary old ham radio hobby would be rejuvenated digitally, I would have grabbed you and choked you till you told me who was supplying your weed!
The web remains mostly visual…but fortunately also contains some important, very important text. But after 50 years (that’s the equivalent to 1500 AD in terms of the print revolution), we really have NO idea where digital will take us. This past month we are watching a cavalcade of once big time digital news organizations going down…so even digitalized news is still too boring for many.
Now some are using the web to turn on lights, lighting stoves and starting cars, or ogling their dogs and cats remotely via webcams. There is also social media that is hardly neutral. The protocols that have emerged for most social media is to be short, and nasty. Some progress that is! And how many people, not just young ones either, are increasingly introducing the bastard abbreviated lexicon of email into daily written and spoken speech, LOL. People are forgetting how to write in fluent English because what difference does it make on Instagram? They surely are not writing letters to anybody – for that you would need to know where to buy stamps.
I would argue that at this point, the digital revolution has put the facts of the world, the entirety of human history, at our immediate reach in our pocket smartphone. But make no mistake, facts are NOT knowledge. Two different animals. Ask a young person when President McKinley (who he never heard of) was shot and within 20 seconds he will have the answer. And that’s all he or she will have. Next? Who won the Red Sox game this afternoon?
And so what kind of progress is this? To the degree that humans learn that their phones can answer most of their immediate concerns, why bother, then, to actually learn anything with any depth? I have the studies here on my desk but not gonna bore you with too much exposition other than to say it has become clear that as time passes, people actually know less than they used to. They may have heard Kyiv was bombed last nite but they have no idea where or what a Ukraine is in the first place. And as obvious as it seems, you can bet that an overwhelming majority of even Ivy Leaguers freshmen today know more about Cardi B than either WWII or the prospects of a WWIII. There are people among my friends who cannot tell you the cardinal points because they have used a GPS for the last 30 years and there is no longer a pressing need to know even your local geography. Just like timepieces and calendars eroded human knowledge about the natural rhythms of our own bodies and of Nature itself. BTW, how many times, usually on an early Monday morning, have you looked at your watch with real hatred and scorn, wishing you could smash it against a wall. For centuries already, watches are robot technology that greatly impact and influence our lives —hour by hour.
I see I’m 1500 words into this chunk of exposition and only now am I getting around to AI. The above should already give you a clear view of my POV on AI. Here comes a new technology destined to change everything, and way too much about ourselves, and there is no regulatory agency on top of it. Par for the course as regulation always comes too late, after the given technology has already rode rampant. And if you think the FCC does a good job of regulating TV, you must live in Denmark.
As of the moment, most of the speculation and hand wringing over AI boils down to what happens when it becomes sentient and starts to control itself? I find this to be a tertiary concern at best. If it’s a machine, it can be unplugged or disabled. We suspect! We are also already acutely aware of how AI can and will certainly be used to manipulate and deceive people. One can argue that TV has certainly blazed that path. And I have no doubt we are about to be inundated with deep fakes, phony pics, phony everything when it comes to politics and I, for one, have no idea how we will confront it (possibly with a counter-technology that exposes or blocks AI generated spam).
Frankly, robots running robots does not scare me half as much as humans running robots and that is where our real fears should reside. And not just in manipulation of the public…as I said, that has been roaring along for century already via electronic and print media. And we do have some but probably insufficient natural immunities. I cannot imagine robot masters being worse than human masters as the former lack the ego, greed, dark hearts, will to power, and hubris that define the latter.
My biggest concern, however, is while AI will most likely have some very positive applications in medicine, and some spooky ones certainly in the military, it will likely have its greatest effect in further eroding human knowledge on a mass basis. Doctors might get smarter and more efficient in detecting disease with AI, but most of us are not doctors. To try to make this point economically, AI will do to your child’s knowledge base what WAZE and Google Maps has done to eradicate knowledge of local geography. What 250 other things we will “forget” how to do as AI advances?
I heard today that the US govt has approved trial runs with actual humans for Elon Musk’s AI brain implant that will read your mind and execute what you are thinking. There’s already been one experiment with a subject successfully moving a computer mouse just by thinking about it (a possible Trump defense in the secret docs case?). What problems does this solve? And what problems will it create? Nobody knows. It’s a terrible experiment that should not have been approved unless Elmo’s company could have turned in a 1000 page brief to the FDA explaining exactly what practical uses and what practical dangers are inherent in this new gadget before going ahead. And I would venture, today, that a really powerful bank of computers run by a robot would do a better job running Twitter than Elmo has.
Here’s a micro example of the much larger challenge we will be facing. I saw a new TV commercial yesterday starring the best living, working pitcher in American baseball – Clayton Kershaw—touting Skechers’ new line of slip on tennis shoes. I mean if you are still using your hands to put your shoes on, man, you are just an ancient fool.
Yes, it is convenient to just slip on your shoes. And your child will never have to teach their child how to tie shoe laces. Just as convenient it will be for you or your child to ask Chatbot to explain what the difference is between black and white, or asking how to boil and egg or make a piece of toast or where is north? Or where is Mexico?
Lots of talk on college campuses about how AI will be used by students to cheat (as if many did not already pay to have their admittance essays written by some retired Boomer). They will. Our society celebrates “winners” more than scholars so expect a lot more than the already endemic level of cheating to get ahead.
But the real victims are not going to be the professors or the university administrators. The real victims are going to be full-on AI adapters who with each day will learn how to do less and less for themselves and whose relationship to reality will be further mitigated by software. Just as Postman correctly argued that the Age of Print allowed childhood to be created for children, the Age of AI is most likely to do the opposite….turning all of us into fairly uneducated kids. ++
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