AI and I

 

Image of cat and fiddle, with cow jumping over moon, by Dall-E

I’m a bit of a techie. I was developing educational software for the Ontario Ministry of Education back in the early eighties, and taught desktop publishing at George Brown College. I’ve only recently let that side of me take a rest. So I’m naturally fascinated by AI. 

The reality is that it is coming at the speed of a freight train on the main line whether we want it or not. We need to figure out what this means. 

It is going to make a lot of things cheaper. It is a dirty secret that AI can already diagnose illnesses more accurately, let alone more quickly, than an MD. So much for the doctor shortage. So much for the spiralling costs of Medicare. The vast majority of legal work can be replaced by AI: most of it is drawing up contracts and looking up cases in the law books. Perfect for computerization. Accounting too should be easy for AI to take over. So the most expensive things in the economy may soon be available to everyone for pennies.

Just yesterday, for the first time, I used AI to prepare my monthly student assessments. Saved a lot of time, and with only a little tweaking, it was perfectly accurate and acceptable. I’ve started to use AI instead of Google for online search, and this is again much more efficient.

Elon Musk and other high tech honchos predict that soon, with AI, there will be essentially no need for anyone to work, and we will nevertheless have a high standard of living. There will be little need for money. So that’s all good.

There are certainly also dangers from AI. 

First off, if AI can take over all the white collar jobs, and robots can take over all the blue collar jobs, things may be cheaper, but there seems to be no way left for us to generate any income.

My fantasy has been that, with AI taking over all the soulless occupations, we will be freed for purely creative work, for the arts.

But in its latest iterations, AI can produce quite competent art, and poetry, and stories, and videos. So is there any market left for humans even here?

I argue elsewhere that the human element here remains conceptually irreplaceable; just as a robot girlfriend would never be a legitimate alternative.

Whoever programs AI can also program it with their own political biases; can program it for totalitarian purposes, or in their own favour. In theory, we can always pull the plug; but if done well, especially over time, this could become impossible to detect. A matrix.

This is why it is important that it become and remain open source.