Artificial Idiots

To paraphrase The Beatles, "I heard the news today, OH BOY!" pundits were all a twitter about the advances in Artificial Intelligence and how people who once hailed it as the salvation of modern society are now worried that instead of helping with their jobs, AI might actually be stealing their jobs. I doubt a greedy corporation would ever eliminate jobs to save a couple of bucks, but AI is growing and winding its way into all facets of our lives.

Walter Ruther said that "automation will be the salvation of the working man" and from a safety standpoint he might have been right—you can't get hurt on a job that you're laid off from—but for my part I don't trust AI. I'm not a luddite. I don't fear technology. But I do think the over-reliance that smartphone zombies have for technology is making them dumber (I don't know my wife's or my kid's phone numbers). Furthermore, smart technology isn't that smart. At least for now.

I did a series on the future of work for Authority magazine and a couple of Tech Experts suggest that everyone learn to write code. Okay, I admit AI is smarter than these guys, because AI not only can already write code, but it can do it better, more accurately, and faster than human coder (and it can debug code in minutes that would take a human week's to do the job.)

From my vantage point, AI can do a lot of things, but they suck at most of them. I have Amazon Echo devices in almost every room of my house. They work...sporadically. Some tasks they do very well, for instance if I say, "Alexa, play The Beatles" it does a great job of playing music by this particular artist. But if I tell it to play white noise it will turn it on, but when I try to turn it off no command in the English language will silence the beast. My wife figured out that if she commands it to open something else and then a split second before it executes she commands it to cancel it will finally shut its filthy digital maw. Sometimes, and the frequency is increasing, Alexa will blurt out an answer from an Amazon contributor without anyone saying the activation word.

And before anyone accuses me of picking on Amazon programmers, sorry Apple, Siri is worse at everything. I have an Apple Watch that blurts out random crap while I am on the phone in important conversations. As for the iPhone, I will worry about the robot uprising when I can make a call and not leave a voicemail where I scream "Cancel!! Cancel!! Cancel!! although the bright side is I think I may have disrupted a couple of sleeper cells.

And predictive text is like having a conversation with my late aunt. I swear by all that is holy I can finish a sentence without someone trying to guess what I am about to say like some perverse version of the $125,000 Pyramid (or whatever the prize is). I have had auto correct change an inoculons message to my wife into profane word salad (okay, so maybe AI isn't all THAT unintelligent).

So a bunch of low paying crappy jobs disappear who cares? Well, the people who depend on those jobs do for starters. I remember being a kid and standing in awe of the superstore checkouts—35 lanes and people lined up with carts full of groceries. The last time I was in a store there were two registers open and 12 self-serve registers. I said to the cashier, "sooner or later people will realize that kiosks don't buy groceries" her response was so stupid she could have been mistaken for AI. "We're always gonna need groceries." True, we will always need groceries, but we will need money to buy the groceries, and we will need jobs to buy the groceries. I didn't waste my time explaining the relationship between job=pay=groceries. I wrote an article on the erosion of the working class and was laughed at and ignored so why rehash it.

Back to the news. The expert was all aflutter about how AI was now being used as to write news articles, marketing copy, advertising, and blogs and will soon be able to write books. Since hearing that I am sensitive to what I see and hear in advertising and well...I suspect some of the inane gibberish that passes for advertising was written by AI. "Only buy what you need?" What fun is that? And where were you $200,000 ago?

Dr. Ian Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldbloom) admonishes a bunch of scientists with, "you spent so much time wondering if you COULD do something that you never bothered to think about whether or not you SHOULD do it. I don't make a living writing, and I'm not worried about losing my job to AI—I'll be dead long before AI is sophisticated enough to do anything well.

So why am I so troubled by the threat of AI? Because it is created in the image of engineers and code writers. It doesn't know what it feels like to get the call that its father is dead. It can wistfully reminisce about the sweet embrace before a first kiss. It won't know the pain of standing helplessly aside the hospital bed where its five-year old child lies dying, racked with pain. It will never know the joy of hearing its toddler's first word, or the betrayal of cheating spouse. It doesn't think therefore it isn't. Oh sure, it can approximate reasoning, it can be made to respond as if it is human it has no empathy, no compassion, it is, beyond everything a computer generated sociopath.