The Artificial Intelligence Hoax
There is a movement underway to convince you that Artificial Intelligence is a massive, accelerating threat to your freedom and our way of life. The ones who are most alarmed are political commentators and technology experts on the right. The political commentators are ignorant of the real technology issues involved, and the technology experts are so isolated in a silo of delusion that they are the last people we should look to for the real nature of the threat.
Yes, there is a threat. But it’s not Artificial Intelligence overtaking human autonomy. It’s Artificial Dementia overtaking our systems infrastructure.
What? Yes. What purports to be Artificial Intelligence is in fact the opposite. You’re already experiencing this phenomenon, whether you choose to recognize it or not. Your social networks are a vivid case in point. Haven’t you noticed that every new release of device operating systems, network-level applications, and so-called task-level productivity aids only make things worse, more complicated, more time consuming to use, and more inconsistent, compatibility issues increase, functional features disappear or are changed in inexplicable ways for no discernible purpose. Think about it. You know what I’m talking about. Think of the highhanded idiocy of spelling software that incorrectly insists it knows what Proper Name you are trying to type and keeps forcing you to edit your own way back to what you intended.
Your television streaming services are similarly afflicted. Various of them are starting to bomb you out of them more often for weird glitches in internal software handoffs, like the transition from content to commercials. The interfaces of these services grow more intricate and unpredictable all the time, and, no, it’s not you getting too slow to keep up, it’s bad design and worse execution.
Conspiracy? Part of the Great AI Conquest? No. Dead simple answers here. Our education systems have been seriously degraded by declining discipline, falling standards, social justice digressions in curriculums, and perverted admissions practices used by universities that don’t care what their students learn, only that the federal grants and subsidies that fatten the endowment and professorial salaries keep coming.
Now the feared Big Tek monster companies are hiring computer scientists who can’t write programs because they can’t write sentences, and their supervisors can’t communicate with them or their bosses because they know nothing but code and can’t explain things in common sense terms to anyone. Result? Algorithms that are thrown individually into complex systems with no system supervision, human or technical, to keep them from forcing errors, worthless function, and illogical noise into the processes they infest.
Why it takes you 10 to 50 percent longer to type your Facebook post. Why Electric car batteries explode for no reason and burn for days. Why self-driving automobiles send vehicle occupants into head-on collisions or over cliffs by following GPS prompts. Why next-generation Airbus and Boeing airliners fall mysteriously from the sky, 1) piloted by crew who no longer know how to fly by the seat of their pants and 2) controlled by ambitiously dictatorial computer systems containing undocumented 3rd party modules with fatal flaws designed into them.
We’re there already in dozens of technological and scientific systems areas. It will get progressively worse. Why? Because the technologists have grossly deluded themselves about what “Artificial Intelligence” might be. They think it’s about making computers so fast and storage-rich that they can know more than any human being and make better decisions faster. They even think their Frankenstein AI creations are sophisticated enough to pass the notorious Turing Test*, which someone smugly claims to have done every year or so. They are absolutely dead wrong about all of this.
When a supercomputer beats a Grand Master of Chess, it’s not because the computer is more intelligent. It has been applied to an instance that is not exemplary of real life. Chess is a finite problem. 64 squares, 32 playing pieces, and 6 different rules of movement. The number of possible next moves available to any piece in any single board configuration is a finite number. It’s a computation exercise governed by some set of yes/no-oriented algorithms. The human deficit in speed of computation can be, and is, overcome by a combination of intuition, experience, imagination, and intelligence, meaning the ability to model the entire reality of the game, including psychological propensities of an opponent for example, that the brutish computer simply smashes through like a bull in a China shop — by calculating all possible outcomes and picking the right one according to a simple rules set. Give the Grand Master enough time and experience playing the supercomputer, and he will eventually de-engineer the flaws in the silicon-based set of decision algorithms, acquiring a winning advantage.
The mistake the technologists make is falling for their own (always) rough metaphor that a computer is like a brain and can copy its operations precisely and far more swiftly. Except that the metaphor fails catastrophically because the brain is not like a computer, and a computer cannot ever be a simply better brain because it’s not possible for a human mind to figure out everything the brain does and exactly how it does it.
How to understand this? This conversation can get get extremely complicated, and the more complicated it gets the less the technologists can argue by any means but dismissal, the same way evolutionary biologists dismiss the obvious but unprovable (in their terms) truth that the laws of physics do contain a counterforce to entropy, meaning that just as all things fall apart, all things also keep coming together again, progressively more intricately, beautifully, and vitally. Proof? There is nothing in nature more beautifully complex and ineffable in its capabilities, dimensions, and products than the human brain.
Of course the brain also has tools no “Artificial Intelligence” can ever possess — a living body, organic senses, appetites, a continuous existence in chronological time, and a governing metaphor of human identity consisting of the mind that seamlessly employs billions of inputs to generate experience and outcomes in accordance with an individually perceived reality. This is so far beyond what a computer can ever hope to achieve that it’s like comparing Mr. Machine to a mouse because the mechanical toy can walk, make noise, and repeat customary motions. But Mr. Machine can never smell or desire cheese, procreation, or sleep, and the toy can never feel fear of larger critters, traps, pain, or death. It can’t scream, meaning it cannot hear its own scream as the teeth are tearing away its throat.
We can’t give these attributes to computers because we will never be able to enumerate or understand all of them, because WE ARE THE THING WE ARE STUDYING AND CAN NEVER BE OUTSIDE IT ENOUGH TO KNOW IT OBJECTIVELY. There will always, still, eternally, be the ineffable part of the thing that is watching the thing under the microscope.
What can we do? We can understand that there is danger in the Tek Lord promises of Artificial Intelligence, and we can learn how to defeat what will be attempted in the name of AI in order to control us with a lie.
The Tek Lords can build machines and systems that mimic primitive human skills. All this talk about the ‘intelligence’ of computers that can plagiarize Wikipedia better than a semiliterate millennial college student and write research papers that will pass muster with incompetent teachers who don’t know their subject and won’t read the papers anyway. That’s not intelligence, artificial or otherwise. It’s mimicry that can never achieve more than mediocrity. It’s a scam. A scam that is most definitely being planned in detail, with laws and other powers behind it, to rule us during the coming Dark Age of lifelong human semi-consciousness.
Don’t let Joe Allen, Steve Bannon, Alex Jones, and other AI alarmists scare you about the omnipotence of the technology. Be scared instead about the malignant (and ignorant) power-mad despots behind the technology, which cannot succeed in doing anything but reduce civilization to a rusting, starving carcass.
For those who may be wondering, I am qualified to participate in this debate. I have been exploring this subject in depth for at least 30 years, led by a perspective different from any I have yet encountered. Anyone and everyone is free to disagree, of course, but the deeper the argument digs, the more it favors my position. The word hoax in the post’s title is accurate.
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*Turing Test. A joke with a charismatic punchline. A computer that can convince a human being it’s a human being. A scam from the word go. It’s no more than a conjurer’s trick, like sawing the lady in half on a stage in Las Vegas. You control all the observational conditions, you set up the interaction for the express purpose not of demonstrating a reality but fooling the audience, which is an entirely different (and disingenuous) objective. It’s show business and nothing more. I’ve already published the step-by-step flowchart of a computer program designed to beat the Turing Test. It might even work. But my approach was a joke too.
Ive had the same argument with people. ‘They have technology that can control human thinking and allow us to be happy.’ ‘What makes for someone to be happy?’ What is a thiught? How do i hear a word or a sentence in my head? What is comsciousness? Where is my mind?’ Of course no one can answer any of that. ‘If humans don’t know the answers to these questions they cant possibly do what yiu claim.’
ReplyDeleteAI is little more than a multi-dimensional "line of best fit", using data it already has to determine the most statistical likely answer from its database. It parrots what is has been fed. The only ones who have to fear these vast statistical engines are those whose intelligence does not exceed that of mere parrotry, and cannot act on statistical unlikelihood.
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