Stephen Hawking warns that AI will be the biggest event in human history, with potentially disastrous results. He thinks that humans won’t be able to keep up with AI and will be replaced by machines. Bill Gates and Elon Musk echo those concerns. Both of them think that artificial intelligence is the greatest threat to of all time.
This brings to mind the scary killer robots of the “Terminator” movies. It conjures images of a stark lifeless landscape with soulless machines grinding our bones to squeeze the minerals from them. This whole “end-of-humanity” scenario is the stuff of nightmares. It seems that the potential even keeps the geniuses awake at night.
I think its bull. I think it isn’t going to happen, and I’ll tell you why.
What’s called artificial Intelligence has been around a long time. It’s been a subject almost as long as military intelligence has been a subject, but neither one really exists. They’re more of a goal than a real thing. Anyone who’s been in the service knows that military intelligence is actually the opposite of intelligence. AI is the same thing.
Very recently one of our great hi-tech firms created an AI “Twitter robot”. It was an artificial teen-age girl that could converse with others in real and meaningful ways. Let me correct myself. The robot is a teen-age girl if the real ones could ever have a meaningful conversation, which they can’t. Anyway, they invented a robot to chat with people on Twitter. It lasted only 24 hours before they turned it off. In that time it became the most obscene, vile, wretched creature ever to enter cyberspace. It advocated the most evil, decadent aspects of mankind. It seems that AI wasn’t intelligent at all.
Several companies have artificial electronic assistants. They are AI, but don’t do well at all. If you ask one to play a common song, if they do anything at all they usually play something bizarre and completely unrelated to what you want. It’s become a game to see how many stupid things the AI will do.
Self driving cars use Artificial Intelligence. The federal government has determined that a legal driver for a car doesn’t have to be human. Having driven in city traffic all over the world, I agree that drivers often are something other than an intelligent human. These drivers do things no person would ever do, so they’re something else.
As for AI operated cars, it makes sense they are on the road mainly in California. We all expect the left coast to do the weird. It’s funny that the first AI accident recently happened. The self-driving car hit a bus. Maybe it was busy on twitter and didn’t see the bus. I’m not sure if the AI driver was distracted because it was trying to get its AI assistant to play its favorite show tune. We may never know.
It is true that the military is investing your money in AI. You’ve probably seen the video of 6 feet tall robot running through the woods. You also saw that it had an umbilical cord the size of a sewer main trailing behind it. I wasn’t impressed. If we have these robotic soldiers it’s only a matter of time before they get their cords all tangled up and run into a tree.
The biggest reason I don’t think AI is scary is the internet experience. What do I mean by that? The internet has unlimited resources and infinite knowledge. It’s accessible by anyone, anytime, for free. What have we done with this vast capability? We haven’t solved the world’s problems. We haven’t become deep thinkers or researchers. We haven’t dug into the greatest minds in history. We invented funny cat videos. We share recipes and vacation photos. We buy shoes with one click. We dumbed-down the greatest advance in knowledge since writing was invented.
AI is going to be the same. We’ll end up with artificial mimes and robotic politicians. AI will develop even cuter cyber-kittens. Our distraction by the trivial will be complete and we’ll end up as educated as a Roomba. I don’t even want to think about where the porn industry is going to go with this. Can AI get HIV?
Don’t be afraid of AI. Be amused by it. It’s bound to do stupid things. Make sure you share it on Twitter. Maybe your AI assistant can post it for you.
Fini.
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