Life gets more and more complicated. We dive head first, eyes closed, into the pool of Artificial Intelligence… and expect to come out smarter. So everybody has to go to college. (It only hurts when I laugh.)
I got through the “higher education” stuff okay, but coping with all this technology has me talking to myself.
I need a miracle.
I remember when it used to be sort of an urban legend: new cars’ electronics spy on you, collect information, always ready to rat you out to the government.
It ain’t so legendary anymore.
TV commentator Tucker Carlson bought a new truck… and “immediately” returned it to the dealer when he saw this message on his dashboard:
“Stop, we’re downloading information from the Internet.”
Which the car owner did not ask the car to do.
They wanted that data, Carlson said, “to provide to the insurance companies to wreck your life.”
Expansion-hungry government and high technology: what could go wrong?
Computer-generated, make-believe, and phony as a $3 bill–and she’s all yours!
Hey, check out the current Malwarebytes newsletter (https://clicks.malwarebytes.com/e/evib?_t=24fabbbc5c2c43578ed8469e4f452569&_m=6d18adbfaab8417ea23ea21e3d55fe76&_e=TGxpKV8tRBiJhp-BFb0ZhCVS4wyZ6nemazqTBv5r4mvYX9VvQ2zlXVmfS8wTOkfVCt-3H_aar9F156la0uo1Qg%3D%3D)! Anything with a web address that complicated has got to be good.
People thoughout The Land of the Free are getting frazzled by technology that they didn’t need in the first place–and now it’s driving them up the wall. Stoves, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners: all hooked up to the Internet.
Why does anybody need a “smart” vacuum cleaner? There’s a vac with a video feed. At last! I can film the dust-bunnies under the bed!
Best of all is the rise of the “AI girlfriend,” a make-believe, computer-generated sex slave… which hackers can hack, and blackmailers can use to bleed you dry… if you’re daft enough to go for this.
Why in the world do we want hi-tech everything? Settin’ ourselves up for a mighty powerful hurt, aren’t we? The whole world’s connected! And then something goes wrong with the connection. Oops.
Even a gecko can get more out of a smart phone than I can.
So we couldn’t get Whole Foods discounts because we didn’t have a cell phone. It was an eye-opener for the folks at Whole Foods headquarters. They never imagined half their customers would choose not to have a mobile phone.
The thing that bugs me about technology is, you wind up depending on it, now it’s part of your life, major hoo-hah if it breaks down (as it so often does!) and suddenly you don’t have it.
This blog wouldn’t be possible without it. Which to me is a sobering thought.
Haven’t these people ever seen Terminator?
They’re not alive, so robots can’t get tired, bored, or demoralized. Artificial Intelligence, AI for short, has developed yet another feature.
It tells lies. It “systematically induces false beliefs in others to accomplish some outcome other than the truth” (https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/05/here-come-lying-ai-robots-study-alerts-that/).
We learn that one of these doohickeys, Meta CICERO, was developed to play Diplomacy. This is a game in which there’s no element of chance: you win by persuading other players to take actions that help you more than themselves. There’s also a lot of lying, bluffing, and threatening. Most strangely at all, players who tend to keep their word to other players usually wind up doing much better than the chronic liars.
I have played a lot of Diplomacy. I don’t like the idea of robots evolving into super Diplomacy geeks. Diplomacy is not a moral game.
Anyway, now we have AI that has learned to lie and cheat.
I would not like to plead a defense of this age on Judgment Day.
How many science fiction stories are there, that warn of the replacement of the human race by robots?
It doesn’t look far-fetched to me. Keep shootin’ up with puberty blockers and see what happens to the birth rate.
But really! Having robots play games for you, so you can brag about the games you’ve won? What profound dishonesty. No wonder we’re ruled by Democrats.
Okay–who out there did not know that this would happen? If that’s you, take your head out of that hole in the sand.
So the Amazon delivery guy, wearing headphones, thought he heard some forbidden remark from the customer’s “smart” doorbell; so he reported it to Amazon, they decided it was Racist… and shut down the whole shebang (https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/amazon-shuts-down-customers-smart-home.2392704/).
Locked out. No lights. No air conditioning. No phone service. The poor devil was locked out of his home for a week! Because some delivery guy thought he heard something that mighta-coulda been Racist. Betrayed by a wonky doorbell and a delivery man too lazy to take off his earphones so he could hear things clearly.
Is the lesson here that Amazon can do anything to you that it pleases? Or just that having a “smart home” is really pretty stupid? It’s not a court of law, you know: they don’t have to prove their case, and you don’t get any opportunity to defend yourself. “That feller thought you said…” is enough to get your locked out of your home. You can’t appeal the decision.
Freedom, liberty–if the government isn’t lusting to take it away from you, many major corporations are.
The flag of Palookastan (Don’t ask…)
The People’s Republic of Palookastan likes to call itself “The Science Is Happening Place of All Central Asia.” And to prove it, they’ve passed a law that from now on, all marriages in Palookastan will be arranged by Artificial Intelligence.
President For Life Timoor Shakaleg laughed off some early glitches in the program. “These things happen!” he chortled, in between supervising firing squads. “A man in Jezhnivabad was told he had to marry the city’s founder, Lady Zoof, who died eight hundred years ago. And we had a woman in the mountains for whom is was arranged that she marry her wheelbarrow! So who said science has no sense of humor?”
Comrade Timoor found it slightly less than humorous when the robot directed him to marry his old nurse, Madame Pzessky, who used to make him eat bugs and told him The Blob was going to get him if he didn’t. “A thoroughly odious woman–I hate her!” he said. But moments later, “Well, science is science and we have to do what Science says! Even when we don’t understand it. Science is the only defense we have against Religion. So if Science says ‘Marry your old baggy pants,’ well, then, you marry your old baggy pants! But I regret to report that Madame Pzessky’s whereabouts are currently unknown.”
He has turned down an offer by Acme Robotics Inc. to replace Madame Pzessky with a convincing facsimile.
Justice and computers–it won’t work
We had a case just like this one in New York a few days ago. There’ll probably be more of them–because lawyers are as lazy and shifty as anybody else, and they’d rather let a robot prepare court briefs than do it themselves.
A Texas judge has banned the use of “Artificial Intelligence,” aka AI, in preparing briefs for court cases (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-judge-bans-chatgpt-court-filing/). No more ChatGPT, says Judge Brantley Starr.
Why not? Because, he explains, the robot can and does “invent facts”–invented facts aren’t facts at all–and has “a tendency to hallucinate.” Oh, spiffy. Imagine losing a major lawsuit, or even going to prison, because some machine invented “facts” against you. I wonder if that’s happened yet. “AI” is coming on too fast to be monitored. We’ve heard lots of warnings about that, including some by the same tech wizards who developed AI in the first place.
And anyway, do we really need robots to help us lie? We’ve always done a fabulous job of that ourselves.
It’s only hi-tech make-believe.
More than 50 years ago, the man who invented the first “conversational” computer, now known as “Artificial Intelligence” or “AI,” predicted the dangers of users getting, as it were, addicted to the “superficial conversations” provided by computers (https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23617185/ai-chatbots-eliza-chatgpt-bing-sydney-artificial-intelligence-history?fbclid=IwAR2xHMA5SHuU9yyXrUnafdQC8vRWQ-HxUpedzKRNMwJmY42qc6aPvtjR7_I).
It seems the computer is only “parroting back what its users ask for.” Its interactions with users mimic human relationships without actually experiencing them. The more you use AI, the more it “learns” about you.
And somehow the users gradually grow more lonely, more loveless, more devoid of insight, than they were before.
All of this was apparent to the inventor of “ELIZA” in 1966. Now we’re in 2023… and all the problems with ELIZA are still there. Which doesn’t stop us from diving headfirst into AI as an infallible guide to living life.
Yo! A computer doesn’t KNOW anything! It doesn’t experience anything. It doesn’t feel anything. It only mimics humans–without anything we can call “understanding.” The more you put into it, the better it mimics human thoughts and feelings. It can string together a bunch of cliches into a love letter, a short story, or a political speech. All it can do is imitate life without being alive.
And while all this is going on, the AI is, in a way, “programming its users.” The machine imitates us, and we wind up imitating the machine.
I do wish God had made us wiser.