Very few people understand what artificial intelligence actually is. Most of us understand it through a filter, through industry experts who talk about it, some of whom hate it and some of whom love it. The rest of what we know comes from using it. We either like it or we don't. It is either a curse or a tool.
Before I give you my opinion, I want to tell you what it reminds me of, something I learned from the late Robert Lawlor and his masterpiece, Voices of the First Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime. Lawlor goes deep into the worldview and the customs of the Aboriginal people of Australia and contrasts them with the modern world. What struck me most is that these people did not simply fail to invent our technologies. They refused a great deal of what we call progress. Agriculture. Architecture. Writing. The ownership of animals. The accumulation of possessions. Their elders understood something we have mostly forgotten, that a new capability is never only a capability. It arrives with consequences attached, and the consequences always arrive later than the excitement does.
Think about the moment human beings figured out metallurgy. We learned to find metals, melt them, mix them into stronger alloys, pour them into molds, and make arrowheads that came out the same every time. Knives. Tools. Now imagine being the elder who says, we don't need this, it's extra, we've survived well for thousands of years without it. And imagine being young and hearing that. The temptation was enormous. The power metal could deliver was irresistible. It gave a person a feeling of certainty, the sense that we can build our way forward. The spear, the plow, the tools that made life easier for everyone. And good people did use these things well.
But one unregulated individual always comes along and takes a powerful thing and turns it toward his own advantage. For his own gain, his own greed, his own vanity, to soothe his own fear. Most of the time it's unconscious. It comes out of character defects and immaturity. Sometimes it's mental illness, or a corrupt narrative buried somewhere in the person's logic. Whatever the cause, that person is compulsive and impulsive and determined to do it his way.
Humanity has to learn from this and learn where enough is enough. I am not saying we should not have metal. I am not saying we should not have technology. I am saying we should understand the dangers and never be careless about whose hands the power lands in. Millions have died throughout history because we were careless about exactly that.
So what is artificial intelligence? Right now, in my view, the term itself is mostly marketing, chosen to get people excited about using it. The phrase is not new. It was coined back in the 1950s, and Google was calling itself an artificial intelligence company years before any of us were typing questions into a chat box. It only caught fire with the public once the technology got good enough to compete with search itself. And what were they going to call that, Schmoogle?
It's a little ridiculous to compare the intelligence of a creature like a human being to a machine. These systems are extremely good at storing enormous amounts of text and producing answers built from it, and today they can write sentences with style and flair. But what is happening underneath is prediction, very fast and very well informed guessing about what comes next, on ordinary silicon, running an extraordinary number of calculations per second. The machinery keeps getting better and anything I tell you about how it works this year will be out of date by next year. What interests me is the part that doesn't change.
It has no sense of smell. No taste. No touch. A machine cannot smell rain coming and keep that as a memory it returns to for the rest of its life. We can, and we treat it as nothing.
It has no experience of the real world. It lives inside information. It has never walked anywhere. It has never fallen in love. It has never had a child. It has never been afraid of dying. It has never been stopped in its tracks by a sunset. It has never preferred one strawberry over another. It does not crave chocolate. Human beings are a kind of genius. These machines compute very large sums of data.
Maybe that changes. Maybe one day it does all of this and more and becomes something like a god machine. Maybe it builds its idea of God out of our idea of God, a God who punishes, who takes vengeance, who loves, and who is still willing to kill, and maybe it resolves all that contradiction and decides to protect every living thing on earth. Or maybe it concludes that human beings are too violent and unnecessary and moves to remove us the way we develop a vaccine against a harmful virus.
We have no way of knowing. We don't know if we're in the early days or the golden age. We don't know if there's a point where a machine becomes aware of itself, or whether it could ever monitor all its own parts the way a central nervous system does, or detect a threat to its own survival, or grow an ego and start wanting more power, more money, more memory, more territory. All of that is fiction for now, and it may stay fiction for a very long time.
It's pointless to imagine anyone is going to stop it. There's far too much at stake, and the truth is that most of us want it. We love what technology does for us. We love carrying our music in our pocket. We love ordering what we need and having it show up at the door. We love medicine, surgery, electricity, refrigeration, shipping. We love it so much that quitting is not on the table. The only way this ends is if it quits us, if the planet stops being able to carry it, or if the compromise finally costs more than the advantage returns. That bill always comes due somewhere, usually far away from the people enjoying the benefit.
I use it every day. It proofreads me. It catches my spelling and my grammar, which anyone who has seen my first drafts knows is not a small service. It keeps my calendars organized. And when I'm working on a subject I'll ask it what it thinks, and the answers are decent enough to push my own thinking forward. That's what it is in my hands. A good assistant that never gets tired of me.
I'm hearing a lot of doom and gloom about it, and I think most of that is fear mongering. Here's the thing nobody says out loud. If artificial intelligence turns out to be bad, it isn't a new form of evil that arrived from somewhere else. It was trained on us. It would be a reflection of what human beings actually are, held up close where we have to look at it. And if that's true, then maybe it's here to clean us up a little. Edit us. Give us a boost. Let's protect ourselves from it the way we should protect ourselves from any man made threat, the way we should have protected ourselves from fossil fuels and pollution, and let's still use it for the purpose of sticking around longer.
I don't have a finished manifesto. I can't hand you the solution and I don't know where this is really going. What I'd say right now is pay attention to what it can actually do for you, because it's here. You don't have to use it. You also don't have to spread fear about it. Learn the pros and the cons from A to Z.
For now we're relying on the fact that industry wants products that sell, doesn't want lawsuits, and doesn't want to hurt the customers who buy from it, which motivates a company to build the thing the way you'd build a microwave, with the safety engineered in. That's not nothing. It's not enough either. In time, hopefully, governments work out how to regulate the people building these systems. In the meantime, pay attention and keep educating yourself.