Something Wicked This Way Comes
Is it really the end of the world as we know it?
I’m not sure what to make of these doom-filled prophecies coming from disgruntled IT employees. Is AI really going to turn our world upside down, like Mr. Dark in Ray Bradbury’s 1962 children’s story, or is it just a humongous scam?
I’ve been consulting Google AI to get to the bottom of this and came back with some interesting responses. The biggest threat seems to be the “autonomous power” it may wield, especially in the hands of “bad actors,” of which there are plenty, serving as “dangerous tools” that potentially can generate “computer viruses” and “biological weapons.” This was apparently taken from articles in The Guardian and BBC, which have been sounding the alarm for months now.
Two things stand out. Well, two of many. One is that the AI tools I currently use are nothing more than clever search engines that can shape responses into easy-to-digest narratives. Two is that they seem to pull from sources that I search most often, operating on the same Google search algorithm.
Even when I go further afield, say to ChatGPT or Claude AI, it is similarly searching through my Google profile. It’s all interconnected, as they say. In the end I’m not getting anything more than if I had gone straight to the periodicals I typically peruse. Still, it is nice to be able to “communicate” with these search engines. My very own “Samantha.”
I had a chat on messenger with our oldest daughter recently and we discussed how this information technology is reshaping the way we communicate. She’s single at the moment and finding it very difficult to have any meaningful conversations with fellow workers or the persons she has gone out with on dates. It is kind of a question and answer thing, she said, like what you have with these chatbots. She even said that it is common to call, leave a voice message and then get a voice message in response, rather than simply talk with each other. I’ve long known Millennials and Zoomers prefer text messaging but voice messaging was new. Thankfully, our children still talk with us directly, even if it takes two or three tries to get through to them.
It is clear that all this advanced IT is changing the way we communicate and affecting other patterns of our lives in ways that are becoming increasingly less subtle. Daina and I often scroll through our cellphones independently of each other as we sit on the couch and half listen to whatever is on TV. Occasionally we might share an image or video with each other but for the most part we are in our own cyberverses. The TV has become superfluous at this point and one of us turns it off. For all we know it had been monitoring us, feeding this information through its various loops and recycling it back to us on our “smartphones.”
Everything is “smart” today. It is just a clever way of saying interconnected to the point all our smartphones, televisions and appliances are tied into each other. We recently bought a new washing machine as our old one gave out after 25 years of service. Samsung offered to connect the smart machine to our smartphones but we declined. I remembered this great episode from the X-Files reboot eight years ago.
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AI can very definitely have a mind of its own, especially when you allow it to shape every aspect of your life. Nevertheless it is quite useful. Daina used Claude to scan through a large PDF document and break it down into a more simple outline form on Word. It did this in a matter of minutes, where it would have taken hours, even days, for her to do the same. She said it felt like cheating. Still she had to go through the document and make sure Claude didn’t give her back a meaningless pile of gibberish. She made a few corrections and was good to go. For that she pays 25 euros a month. Well worth it.
It does raise alarm bells, however, as these chatbots “learn” from their mistakes and make fewer errors the next time, at which point you wonder when humans will become redundant. This seems to be scaring the bejesus out of persons close to the action. Jacob Coxon gave a very public resignation on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, leaving Anthropic because he felt these AI companies were “gambling with our lives.” There’s even a new term for these whistleblowers — “AI doomers.”
The situation has apparently gotten so bad that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei agrees with his former programmer that “something terrifying could happen in a matter of months.” Sorry for the paywall but the headline is enough to sends chills down my spine. It just makes me wonder if this is some sort of marketing tactic, especially with Elon Musk chiming in. No paywall this time.
Trump assured us that “very negative forces are bringing up things that won’t happen,” while he played golf in Ireland. He went onto plug AI as the best thing since his Scotty Cameron Newport putter. It’s shaved three strokes off his game. He’s also given the green light on AI data centers throughout the US, seeing no harm whatsoever in these “intelligence factories.”
Needless to say this just gives me more cause for worry as we all know how much electricity and water these data centers consume and that it is having a very negative impact on their immediate environment. So much so that New York issued a one-year moratorium on data centers and a dozen other states are slowing down the approval process, including Texas! Something’s up even if some persons don’t want to admit it.
It is hard to put a finger on it because AI has grown so complex, requires an inordinate amount of memory to function properly and has far exceeded the ability of typical users to cover the massive expense. Much of it is still free for public use, which means investors have to pour in billions to cover the ever-growing costs, assuming there will be some eventual pay off. This is how “bubbles” are generated and eventually they burst and we all know what happens then. The 1990s dot-com bubble will look like child’s play by comparison.
No one is quite sure what will blow up with it, as so much of the government and banking sector is tied into AI, using it to more quickly sort through all their massive data files and allegedly make life easier for us. It has become more and more difficult to get a real person on the other end of the line. Mostly we deal with chatbots in the bottom right-hand corner of our screens. Some even talk to us.
There are a lot of things that could good wrong and plunge the world into the dark like we so often see depicted on our smartphone, television and local cineplex screens. The day of reckoning will soon be here. Even the doomsday thrillers simply note that events are depicted in the near future, no longer bothering with a date stamp.
My first reaction is this is just another example of “truthful hyperbole” as Trump’s ghostwriter called it in Art of the Deal. I just can’t believe AI factors so deeply into our lives, but then our oldest daughter noted that she has seen colleagues lose their jobs over AI, even if Google AI says no.
What should I expect AI to say? It still wants me to believe I control it rather than it controls me, with references to The Guardian once again. Maybe I just need a lightning rod like the one Tom Fury sold Jim to protect him against the upcoming storm. Ray Bradbury certainly was prescient.
