On AI: Fear of change or wisdom of mileage?
A couple of weeks ago I wrote, in part, about how I looked at money quite differently 33 years ago when I was a new student at the University of Alabama with a brand new credit card in hand.
I also remember what I thought when taking a new innovations class in the Communications School. My professor, Dr. Singleton, talked about this new thing called the Internet that would soon be available to the average person.
At that point in 1991, the accessibility of the Internet was limited. We had a couple of terminals at the University library that allowed us to access LexisNexis, which provided some research items such as court cases, news articles, etc.
But Dr. Singleton spoke with a palpable excitement about what he said was just around the corner. The 21-year-old me couldn’t quite comprehend what it all meant. Three years later, I saved up enough money to buy a PC and a modem and connected to the Internet at home for the first time. A 14,400 bpm connection on a telephone landline. I think the first thing I did was visit the Louvre. It took about three minutes for a single photo to appear on the screen.
By that time I was 24 and thinking about all the incredible things I could do at home that had been out of my grasp before. There would be so much information available at the push of a button. I had no idea it would kill the industry in which I had just begun working. Of course the Internet didn’t really kill newspapers. Newspapers flung themselves in front of the Internet and allowed it to destroy them.
I mention this because the 53-year-old me would probably have had a more cautious approach to the Internet.
Would this have been fear of change or the wisdom of mileage?
And so here we are with Artificial Intelligence. Predictably, the 53-year-old me looks at AI with a little bit of wonder and a lot of hesitancy. And I am asking myself again if this comes from fear of change or mileage?
The idea of AI has been around since at least 1950 when Alan Turing published his Turing test. Within two years, a program was created to learn from playing checkers. By 1965, computers were helping chemists identify unknown organic molecules. After what was termed a long “AI Winter”, a computer beat Chess World Champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.
Today, cars are self-driving. Programs are diagnosing cancer types better than humans, at least in some instances. Programs can produce realistic pictures from a single line of text. If allowed, high quality motion pictures could be produced and distributed without any actors present.
Even at that, AI is still a toddler. Maybe even younger.
So what to make of all this?
Of course the reason to be hesitant about AI is the potential for widespread harm. Could AIs go rogue and determine that the “most intelligent” thing for humanity is the elimination of some humanity along the way? I know, I’ve watched a lot of movies, but does it seem impossible?
AI is only as “intelligent” as the sources of learning chosen by its creators. If an AI learns only from The View, Jimmy Kimmel, Rachel Maddow and Anderson Cooper, or if it only learns from Clay Travis, Jesse Watters, The Five and Alex Jones, how can it be trusted? And if it learns from all of them, how can it know what is true?
So here is where I am. I want to be filled more with wonder than hesitancy. And history tells me I probably should because our past is full of panic-filled predictions about things that have had overwhelmingly positive impacts on society.
The printing press was the Internet of the 1400s. It opened a world of information to the average person. Before, religious leaders controlled the flow of information. After, people just like me and you could read the Bible and study it for themselves. And guess what? A lot of what people had been told wasn’t in there.
But not everyone was a fan. Abbot Johannes Trithemius is credited with defending the old-fashioned letter-by-letter way of copying texts.
“He who ceases from zeal for writing because of printing is no true lover of the Scriptures,” Trithemius is credited with writing.
Meanwhile, Scribes’ guilds were said to have mobilized to destroy printing presses and chased book merchants out of town.
You can even go further back in history when Socrates is said to have been sour on writing because it weakened the necessity for memory.
Insert literally any technological advancement since then and it has been met with resistance.
Not long after electrical transmission lines appeared overhead in major cities, people sought to tear them down. People feared that once people could have a radio in their home, they would never read again. Same for television, and worse. Many believed the pocket calculator meant no American would ever do math again.
Of course there is a tiny nugget of truth in all of these, but the panic has always been disproportionate to the actual result. And so it will probably be with AI.
So maybe the wonder side of me will win. Will I be able to go to the doctor, get scanned and have a computer spit out the perfect medicine for me, rather than the one-size-fits-all approach we’ve had? Will we detect cancer so early now that we beat it more than it beats us? Will we discover better, safer ways to build buildings, cars and homes? Will we save lives by being much more accurate at predicting severe weather? Will we open windows to new forms of music and cinema we never would have created on our own?
And, along the way, we’ll certainly have to deal with drawbacks. When the printing press became available, people printed all kinds of false information and distributed it to the masses. The radio allowed the Nazis to push its propaganda all over Germany in real time. Of course the same things have happened with TV and the Internet.
The same nuclear technology that can destroy the world at the push of a button can also power it.
But this is the thing tickling the back of my mind that keeps wonder from beating hesitancy in a landslide. Humans are flawed. It is of course displayed throughout the entire Bible and keenly illustrates our need for a Savior. History in total is a great illustration of the flawed nature of human beings.
So, as humans gain more power at their fingertips, the bottom line question is this:
How much is too much?