Groucho Marx, writing a letter of resignation to The Friars Club of Beverly Hills, once said, “I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me for a member.” Often, I’ve attributed that line to my own life in so many ways, but I’ve also often wondered if somehow that is the most singular truth about humanity itself. For me, my natural line of thinking on AI also seem to drift there, as well. Are we really fit to make such a thing? Like the first weapon ever made, shouldn’t someone have stopped and asked, “Just because it can be made, does that mean it should be?” We are all scared of the potential downfalls of AI. Some of Earth’s best movies tell the tale. I can’t even begin to tell you how many times Skynet has come up in serious, adult conversations. Way more than quicksand, I can tell you that! (Kudos to you if you got that.)
Often I’ve shared my thoughts on the limitations of human reason with friends, by explaining that our logic has never been validated outside the human experience. We are a network of human minds; a singularity, misnomer living in a bubble of our own reason. Amusingly I’ve sometimes thought, I wonder what the birds would say about it all. Would even the fish declare, “We’ve been wondering what the heck y’all have been doing since the beginning?” You see, I know a thing, you know a thing, and we both know we know something because we affirm one another’s knowledge. Some of our logic is testable. Yet, even the most reliable truths of Earth haven’t been proven reliable universally. Gravity is a great example of how even the most core nature changes immediately once we leave Earth.
We are afraid of AI because we fear what it might come up with but the reality may be much uglier. The real horror we find in AI, is what will happen when we ask something outside ourself to take what we have reasoned, learn from it and then use it to make it’s own conclusions.
What, wait? Let’s backup…
What is AI – How is AI trained – data sets
The bias toward Black people stories
What is AI – it is HOW we build it.
Conclusion
HOW is maybe more important than IS, and the “then what”
Building great computers to do the thinking we can’t do it awesome and incredibly inspiring. But maybe the takeaway is we need to be spending as much time thinking about the intangibles parts of our creations.
In the opening chapter of his book “The Universe in a Single Atom,” the Dali Lama shares this thought, “If we define the technology before the morality of technology, we will be it’s servants.”
Share the story about Deep Think computer in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy…
End with…