Part Fourteen of Natural Intelligence - How Artificial Intelligence could spiral downward into real stupidity

Part 14 of 14: Conclusion

“And so it goes, and so it goes, and so will you soon I suppose” are some words from a song by Billy Joel, and in writing this very last part in the sequence I may have already lost you, but my hope is that, in some way I have made you think. We are at a very busy intersection, with all the stop signs and traffic lights removed and the speed limit increased. The sensible thing is to stop and consider the peril of that situation and react accordingly. However, by some means you have to figure out how to get to the other side of the road, whether you are in the AI juggernaut travelling down the road, or the pedestrian that is the end user standing on the pavement. We all have places to be and things to do, but we need to be aware and mindful of our surroundings and use that to charter our course.?

Albertism: “Truth is what stands the test of experience.”

My whole premise in writing these has been to stimulate thought, to get people thinking about the “what if” things in life, because that is the basis of innovation and evolution. However, we also have to match that with the “why not”, which can be just as positive a train of thought but actually with a wider scope. Being inquisitive should go hand in hand with being sceptical. We should not simply accept things that are presented to us without validation at lots of levels. We have created a real deficit of teaching people to do this and be acceptant. This is a form of subservience that can be very dangerous, as the systems around us get more and more sophisticated in their precognition and ability to manipulate and create addictions.

Albertism: “To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.”

The largest failure in this process is the lack of education in what we are using, how they work and the risk/reward ratios that these imply (and for whom). It should seem a little perverse that, whilst we are creating “intelligence” in systems, we are not devoting anywhere near as much effort into advancing the intelligence of humans. We should not aim to have systems that, in the round, are more intelligent than ourselves. To do that at best creates a significant technocracy and at worst makes us superfluous. If the professed utopia of machines doing all the work comes true then we become not only dependent on them, but in a lot of ways subservient. What would we do with our spare time of all the pursuits of intellect, learning and creativity have also been taken away?

Albertism: “Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.”

We have to be able to dream, we have to be able to imagine, but the core of that is knowledge. We have to experience to develop, we have to feel to evolve. If we continue to seek abdication from this through surrogate technology then we will wither at the vine.

Albertism: “The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”

And I leave you with this final thought. Although it may have seemed that this was a book written by a Luddite (although they were misunderstood and misrepresented in history, they were not against technology as the term has come to mean, they just represented the earliest form of Trade Union, standing up for the rights of the people affected by technology to get their fair recompense).

Kurtism: I am a technologist, I am an Innovator, I am an advocate of both evolutionary and revolutionary change…

Technology can move us forward in remarkable ways, but we have to be able to keep up, intellectually, with the genies we are letting out of bottles because some of them, just some, need to be put back into the jar again. Educate, educate, educate – we need to completely rethink the way that we teach people, and about what and for what purpose. Sir Ken Robinson was right all those years ago, we are letting technology learn without us, as we are still stuck in a Victorian factory mode of education where the key attribute is your year of manufacture. And so you have a pointer to what the next series of articles will be about… “Educated thinking – the new age of enlightenment” – starting next week

Albertism: “Only those who attempt the absurd can achieve the impossible.”

I hope you have enjoyed the sequence and I would appreciate any comments or discussions on the subject. If you don’t get the context of the conclusion then work backward as each chapter will give you an insight into a facet of the accumulating problem that has not really crept up on us, but has now come to a point of focus.

Coming Next - Educated thinking - the new age of enlightenment