Opus 2026-371: Using Useful Idiots

I’m beginning to temper my attitude toward AI.

We get a lot of fear mongering about how AI is going to take over the world, kill us all, make slaves out of humanity, take away all the jobs.  I’m not sure that there is no valid concern in these areas but like so much of what we get when we pay attention to click-bait there’s a lot of hyperbole involved and a lot of very creative imagination.  Keep in mind the fear factor. Remember the book State of Fear and the military industrial complex..

AI is probably a lot like any other new technology that comes along.  It can be used for evil or it can be used for righteousness.  I think of the way in which conservative Christians reacted to television when it first came out.  I think of the doom and gloom over the VHS format.  The fears were valid.  They have produced the evil that everybody was afraid of.  At the same time there have been tremendous benefit to individuals and society as a whole.

I was looking up a subject the other day and I told Google what I was looking for and hit the button and of course, in the usual format the first thing that showed up was an AI summary.  Now my general pattern is to skip over the AI summary and go start looking at actual sources where human beings have possibly written things down.  Unfortunately, many those sources are also provided by AI and don’t help much or at least don’t get any more reliable than the initial summary.  After consulting everything that was available on the first page and not finding an answer to my question, I went back and took a quick glance at the AI summary and what do you know?  There on the second line was the name of person who turned out to be the one I was looking for.  Maybe I will be able to find a use for these AI bots that seem to want to run our lives.  I say “maybe” with a big note of caution.  I know what a middle C note looks like on the piano and score but I wonder what a note of caution looks like, but I digress.  

I’ve watched different podcasts and read different articles laying down the statistics that show how dependence on AI tends to lower our ability to think on our own, negates research skills, overwhelms discernment, and other evils.  I think you could say the same thing about television when it came out.  I’m sure the television also lowered the test scores of students.  I’m sure the television kept people from reading and thinking on their own.  At the same time you have Maverick, Zorro, Gunsmoke and other distant memories.  Who would want a society that was not influenced by those marvelous cultural icons.

So I guess AI is winning.  It seems to present a commodity that can be actually useful.  As always as painful as it is, I find that I must keep my mind open to new things and keep exploring the possibilities.

homo unius libri