But Will It Eat Us?
In my book proposal currently with my agent I have a chapter with the working title, “How Shall We Then Live?” The sentence has been on my mind for a few months now, ever since I began reading the work of Iain McGilchrist on how left brain/right brain differences affect today’s culture.
The right hemisphere is the primary hemisphere for humans, and the left serves as its emissary. But for the last 500 years left hemisphere thinking has ruled western culture, with plenty of attendant problems. Simply but accurately, the left hemisphere is great at figuring out how to grab things, while the right is great at making sure you’re not eaten by a grizzly bear while you are reaching out and grabbing things.
In a left-hemisphere dominated culture, not enough attention is paid to the right brain’s protection. The left brain says, “I can create AI.” The right brain’s job is to ask, “But is it going to eat us?” In today’s world, not enough people with enough power are focused asking that right brain question.
In the best-selling book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, the authors paint a pretty bleak picture of what happens when artificial super intelligence arrives. They present a convincing case that ASI will in fact, eat us. They say it is not too late to stop it. We’ve controlled nuclear weapons for 80 years because the entire world knows how dangerous they are. They believe ASI can be controlled too, but only if everyone in the world stops building it. Of course, that won’t happen until we all see how truly dangerous it is.
I cannot act at a global level, but I can at a personal level, and I have additional concerns about AI. The arrival of cell phones has brought adolescents who do not know how to show empathy, do not have the ability to put information in a holistic context, and who have a low emotional quotient. With the arrival of ChatGPT we can expect a whole new crop of deficits to develop, all harming the development and health of the human brain.
Only recently have I begun to have to interact with AI, primarily through Google search. Google makes it very difficult to turn off the AI feature in their searches, and those searches have a lot of inaccuracies. If you do a Google AI search of my name, the first seven paragraphs contain five errors, and none of the paragraphs contain information that is current. All of it relates to my first few years as Paula.
If that is the case with my name, it is safe to assume that is the case with pretty much anything Google AI pulls up in searches. I am no longer doing my searches through Google. I’m now using DuckDuckGo.
I never activate the AI feature of Word, nor am I using ChatGPT. I am a writer and speaker. I do not want to diminish those skills. I want to enhance them. I work with speakers, and I can quickly tell if a client is utilizing ChatGPT. They end up speaking in a stilted way because they are using words and grammatical structures that are not natural to them. The words may be smooth, but they are not natural when spoken by my client.
I am not making these decisions because of my age. Learning new technology continues to be relatively easy and natural for me. I am rejecting AI because it is not good for me. I will stick my neck out and say it is not good for you either. If you can explain to me how it truly enhances your life instead of diminishes your life, then I will acquiesce. But nothing I’ve read or heard convinces me that it is good for any of us.
Will AI eat us? That is a bigger question than I can answer, but I would recommend the book I mentioned earlier in this post. I would not suggest reading it when you are depressed, or dysthymic, or suffering from acedia. It will not help you break out of your ennui. But if you are in a place in which sober thinking has room to take root, I’d suggest you inform yourself of the dangers of AI, both for your personal growth, and for the future of the species and planet.
Okay, I promise, in my next post I’ll find something positive to write about. My posts have been skewing a little dark of late.
And so it goes.
