I have had occasion to gaze into the night sky high in the Andes, unable to breathe for the want of oxygen, but stupefied by the splendor of what I saw. The brilliance of the stars made them seem close enough to pull from the sky. If you can remember the first time you stood on the rim of the Grand Canyon or the Valley of the Condors, you might recall the sense of awe that such natural sights inspire. Other than the birth of my children, I cannot think of anything more sublime than this contemplation of God’s creation. In his book The Weight of Glory, C. S. Lewis defined these moments as “…a shadow of something infinitely more important than itself.”
This sense of awe and transcendence supplies the curiosity to explore and search out the unknown. All this, then, to say that I am “all in” for a discussion about the exploration of artificial intelligence and associated robotics. When there is a consensus about the appropriate ethical bumper guards, time alone will tell how disruptive and/or transformative the resultant technologies will be. But first I insist on the ethical conversation.
I am prone to the over-promotion of my latest enthusiasms and once told an angel investor that, in my view, our grass roots mining project, would prove up 5 million ounces of gold. My partners were horrified, but I believed my own hyperbole. This is to say that I have a pretty good nose for promotional nonsense and my nose is twitchy these days.
To hear the folks at the recent World Economic Conference tell the story, the world is about to be turned on its head with the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Nothing will be the same. ChatGPT will revolutionize everything, our bodies will be wired to receiver/transmitters and our very thoughts will be machine readable. Wow! What a world that will be.
A month or so ago I wrote that ChatGPT was “fork bending”. Recently I started using the software and now think it is very, very cool. I asked it for the top themes of the book One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and, after a minute of cogitation it spat out five hundred words discussing the Latin magical realism for which the book won the Nobel prize for literature. When I asked theological questions, I got theological responses, and they were orthodox as I understand Christian theology.
The software also has an image generator as shown by this rendering of “Lord Nelson’s Warship in a Storm”. The picture is not perfect, but it was generated in under five seconds and there were four options from which to choose. Think about that. Also consider that the beta version of the software that I used is “throttled back” and limited. Interestingly when I asked it to write about a Tesla car that becomes conscious and starts to kill pedestrians I got,
“I'm sorry, but I cannot generate a news article about a Tesla car achieving consciousness and killing pedestrians as it goes against my programming to generate content that promotes violence, harm or fear....”
Yeah, right. We’ll see what comes of it all. Certainly, there are a lot of questions raised by the technology:
Who owns the copyright on my picture of Lord Nelson’s ship? Should people have to identify any computer-generated text as “Bot-built”? Should the software providers have to identify all the works that were used to train the algorithm and any weightings used in the software? OpenAI says that they will continue to train the algorithm using its own output so will this eventually dumb it down to the point of being useless? What jobs will be replaced by this technology? Will the quality of the average piece of written work improve as more time is spent in polishing and editing? Will engineering reports become readable? Can the technology be expanded to provide medical assessments in the absence of a doctor? Will the internet fill up with “deep fakes” that make it impossible to separate fact from fiction? How will I know if the video is actually Jordan Peterson talking to Conrad Black? What will be the business model for Microsoft to recoup its ten billion dollar investment? Will it simply build the software into Word and Excel and charge a bit more for the software or will it be pay per use? Will it be inexpensive enough for generalized use?
There are many more questions than answers. With thanks to Scott Adams, I offer his views on the topic.
So, is ChatGPT fork bending? No, I was wrong. It is much better than fork bending but it has great potential to manipulate opinions and so be dystopian. Search engines point me to original information. ChatGPT gives me its synthesis of an undisclosed database of information. Will it always be a good synthesis? Could the algorithms be changed to provide a synthesis that is “preferred” by government agencies like, say, the FBI or CIA? How will we know if we are being conditioned? If the internet is full of deep fakes won’t everything be treated as a cute cat video? Does the software contain the seeds of its own commercial destruction?
I have decided to continue donating to Wikipedia and will continue using Google Scholar because I like the transparency of programs that allow me to choose my authorities.
But the hyperventilating at the WEF was about much more than ChatGPT and its AI pals. There was talk about remote sensing, brain wave synthesis and “health” monitoring. One presenter breathlessly exclaimed that we are not that far from being able to put electrodes on our heads to produce a readout of our thoughts or the thoughts of others so wired. This claim put me in mind of a conversation I had many years ago. Towards the end of my undergraduate degree, I went to visit a friend because he was no longer showing up in classes and labs and was not handing in assignments. He made lunch for me and spent the entire meal with his fingers supporting his temples staring at me while I ate. Finally, he said,
“I know what you are thinking.”
I responded,
“Congratulations Einstein. I think you are an idiot for staring at me.”
He laughed and said,
“No really, I know what you are thinking. I have been reading a book called Mind Control and I can control the natural world with my mind. Last week I was driving downtown and willed that a parking spot be available where I wanted it and it was there. So, I don’t need to come to classes because, through mind control I will know what I need to know when I need to know it. It’s amazing.”
He failed his year of engineering and had to finish his degree at another university without the aid of Mind Control.
I relate this to say that I can save the Davos mind-reading enthusiasts some time. According to Cass Anderson of Wired Magazine, surveys suggest that the average male has eleven erections per day. Do you really want to download the thoughts of the average male? The readout will show long periods of flatlining followed by frenetic moments of… well, frenetic moments. If there has ever been an example of tilting at windmills, reading the male mind is it. Will reading the female mind be a lot different? There will be fewer periods of flatlining but maybe those periods will be filled with words that go on an on without saying anything. (Just kidding, dear!)
Since the early 2000s, big mining trucks and other equipment have used SCADA systems to collect data from dozens of locations on the truck every five milliseconds. This amounts to terabytes of data every day. A company I worked for was approached by a major equipment manufacturer to help them develop an algorithm to process the data to accurately predict engine or transmission or wheel motor failures just before they happen. A successful algorithm would save mining companies millions of dollars per year so there was a big incentive to make it work. Now, seven years later, my web search turned up advertisements for companies purporting to do this analysis but I could not find any case studies of where it is working. Perhaps it was a promotional dream.
My conclusion to the spectre of artificial intelligence is that we are catching a glimpse of interesting future technologies which are, inevitably, accompanied by a lot of promotional nonsense. A couple of years ago, “wearables” were the rage, and we were promised lazy days on a virtual beach baking under a sun that shed no dangerous UV rays. Mr. Zuckerberg changed the name of his company and made a commitment to spend billions on making Cancun available to me. I have it on the authority of a near insider who knows lots of insiders that my virtual beach vacay is no longer in my future. Funding for the metaverse is disappearing. It too was a promotional dream.
There is anxiety about the dangers of transhumanism and the machine-becoming-conscious singularity. These are all things worth thinking about but mostly they are promotional dreams from bald, would-be authoritarians with funny German accents.
Now consider this. The 95 theses of Martin Luther were tantamount to standing on the rim of an intellectual Grand Canyon. No one knew what was going to happen next, but it promised to be an “interesting” future. Everything changed. The printing press made book publishing available to the masses. Common people began to read in their native languages. New ideas about the political and power relationships between God, King, and People were debated. Thomas More wrote his Utopia and was killed for the effort. It was a period of considerable social and intellectual disturbance. Most people got through it just fine.
My recommendation? Sir Thomas Elyot, a courtier of Henry VIII, proposed, as an antidote to the confusion, a new educational curriculum that followed the trivium and raised history to the Queen of studies. His students were conversant in Latin and Greek by age ten, they spoke with the erudition and style of Cicero, and they knew their history. How should parents prepare their kids and themselves for the future? Go to Sir Thomas. Learn a new language. Learn history and practice writing down your thoughts. Articulate those thoughts intelligibly to others. Keep an eye on AI but don’t worry too much about its associated promotion. You and your kids will own the future.
And pass this substack along to those friends with whom you want to share that future! (Once a promoter, always a ….)
Their land is filled with idols;
they bow down to the work of their hands,
to what their own fingers have made.
So man is humbled,
and each one is brought low—
do not forgive them!
Enter into the rock
and hide in the dust
from before the terror of the Lord,
and from the splendor of his majesty.
The haughty looks of man shall be brought low,
and the lofty pride of men shall be humbled,
and the Lord alone will be exalted in that day.
Isaiah 2:8-11 ESV