I remember well, as I’ve written before, my family’s getting our first computer: a Commodore 64. When I was 17, in 1984 (nice dystopian book-title year). It had 64 KILO-bytes of RAM, a millionth of what some laptops have today. A desktop model, it came with a drive for actual floppy disks, 5.25” squares of about 1 MB memory size, which could be DOUBLED using a pair of SCISSORS to turn them 2-sided. Freaky. Screen: 200 by 320 pixels and all of 16 colors: again, a millionth of today’s available hues. Operating system? DOS, pre-windows 3.1. The revolution had entered our home. My parents hardly knew what to make of what they had bought. But we three teenage siblings dove right in.
Now, 41 years and lots of sci-fi books and films later, I find my own self bewildered; much in my parents’ shoes, actually, as is typical from one generation to the next. The new acronyms need learning. As for the new processes the last few years, I will likely never become a regular user of AI chatbots or other assistants to: improve my writing, make a fortune (though that’s tempting), generate still images or videos or music or songs, get a software therapist or companion. I suppose, as my sixth decade closes in, I’m a traditionalist in these things. Meanwhile, in other news: Marrying one’s AI companion?!
Every single person on the planet with a smartphone and internet access can now have their own utterly unique media channel, delivering content tailored to exactly their likes and dislikes in a never-ending STREAM (or SCREAM).
It’s too easy for me to imagine losing too much freedom to a program which, at the start, can barely if at all pass the famous Turing test for “intelligence,” but which in my nightmares ends up running, then ending, my life, having decided that I am one of the 8-plus billion parasites on this world. Sorry/not sorry for the run-on sentence. Bear with me.
There are definitely at least two camps in mass media around the subject of promoting AI’s rise: that urging caution, and that urging surging (after all, if We, the “West,” don’t get there first, the Chinese will!). I follow this subject keenly, and try to find reasonable voices on both sides to listen to.
The stakes seem infinitely high. If AI “gets loose” and decides that we are the world’s main problem, are we doomed?
One way in which I suppose I’m in the small minority in thinking that we are all not just the sum of our material parts, but possessed of soul and spirit aside from body: things which I believe that AI will never gain. So, in spite of all its “cleverness” and speed and processing power, the capacity to really empathize, to model and thus analyze oneself and then others, may forever lie beyond it. It might be able to fake emotions, but I don’t see it getting the true self-awareness that we, its human makers, have.
But if people have already followed their AI companion’s advice and committed suicide, as the media has reported recently, where can we go together next? To what depths can we sink? We are far from perfect and far from innately good, after all, as the last centuries show all too well, despite our technological flights higher and higher. Our capacity for barbarity has not fallen away, not at all. Instead, our capacity for self-deception has grown terrifyingly. At the same time, we are leaping ahead in materials, atomics, subatomics, mathematics, inorganic and organic chemistry, physics, astrophysics, cosmology and much more.
(I just searched for actual confirmation that we HAVE found the long-sought next planet of our solar system, currently presenting strong gravitational evidence for its far-flung existence, as one recent sensational article has already reported. Clickbait… It’ll eclipse all other news for a while when it becomes true. Just an example of what we’re supposed to believe. The search is a fact, yes, but not yet the finding, not at all. How many times a day does my wife ask me if Story X on Facebook is true? I can usually present a denial in about one second, from instinct or look alone).
Not a very optimistic article, but I’m trying to get off my chest what’s on my mind. It doesn’t much keep me awake at night, though, because I still cling (with all my strength) to the unfashionable belief in a good God who will have the last word, and whom nothing can surprise. I just expect that before things get eternally better, they might first have to get terribly, sadly, horribly confusingly worse, because of us humans. Strength for that gauntlet, please.
BLOG by Tony Hanmer
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer and photographer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri: www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
