Killing some time between flights from Edmonton to Tbilisi. Outward it was via Vienna and Montreal; home, via Calgary and Munich. Each way needing one long and two shorter flights, and a good long layover of 9-10 hours, as well as other shorter ones. Exhausting, but necessary. I’ve only managed the trip in two flights once, via Amsterdam, which was last year: spottily available and frequently too expensive.
Now, in Munich, the latest print edition of WIRED magazine caught my eye. Theme on the cover: AI [artificial intelligence] OR DIE TRYING. Intrigued, I thumbed through, then bought it to peruse. Not disappointed. It’s a magazine I have favored over the years, only occasionally buying a copy on paper (usually when I’m alone in airports), but often checking it out online.
AI, which I generally don’t capitalize, is a subject to which I shall likely return as it continues to grow, and as more confusion about it is sown, at breakneck speed…
What are Slack and Discord, featured in some of the stories? Feeling my age (a few months from 60), I had to google to find out. The former is “a digital workspace tool used for team messaging and collaboration”; the latter, “a free voice, video, and text communication service”. Both definitions provided by ai, incidentally, which service I am loath to trust for accuracy and, apparently, justifiably so.
The WIRED articles include plenty of dissatisfaction with various aspects of ai, with which stories I find myself sympathizing. People’s struggles with ai-“possessed” spouses or partners; with ICE in the USA; with a new young music star arrested on suspicion of murder; with perceived unfair treatment when applying for medical residency. Some of the slang, too, was as opaque to me as the above terms I had to google. No surprise: I am quite aware that language evolves over time, even over a person’s lifetime. (I was taught, in Rhodesia, to spell the fixed-wing flying machine as “aeroplane,” and the current 24-hour period as “to-day’.)
Why do I find myself writing so much, lately, about ai at all? Well, it both fascinates and greatly concerns me. Like my language it, too, is evolving, though at a possibly terrifying pace. This, too, should be unsurprising, given the speed at which computers themselves are being improved, from the mid-20th century’s agonizingly slow room-size beasts to today’s latest miraculous smartphones.
Trust an ai counsellor to give you advice? It may suggest cheating on your partner if you’re deeply unsatisfied, or suicide if you’re in a lot of psychic pain. Such recommendations it can offer with impunity at the moment: it doesn’t understand the seriousness of its words, nor can it (or its human programmers) currently be charged or brought to account legally.
My stance continues to be: There may be things I would love to use ai for, grunt work like straightening and maximally cropping photos in bulk, or assembling a perfectly formatted list of citations for an academic paper. Otherwise, I intend to keep it at more than arm’s length, and treat it with a default position of grave distrust, which may be overturned in particular situations, but only begrudgingly. Call me old fashioned: I would welcome the term, not see it as an insult at all, more as a badge of honor. At this point, if any of my current jobs was replaceable by ai, I suppose I would submit to that rather than try to fight it by learning more how to use ai. I’d return to another job which needs humans exclusively…
We’re by no means 100% replaceable, never will be!
[Breaking] And don’t even get me started on “spir(itu)alism, being described online right now as a “religion” originated by ai… what next!
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
