artificial-intelligence

“Don’t go Anthropomorphic on Me”

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I do not think Donald Trump’s rebranding Artificial Intelligence to Super Intelligence is a good thing. I think it is a real misnomer. In fact, it is one step towards humanizing A/I. It reminds me of the movie Blade Runner based on Philip K Dick’s book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

A lot of people are preaching the end of humanity with the advances in A/I or S/I. In my mind, it is really nothing more than semantics. Is there something inherently being changed within this manufactured intelligences that warrants a name change? Is it more than a governmental rebrand? Is it like the New Coke debacle that took place in 1985 when Coke-Cola decided to dump its traditional Coke for something new? Oh, and that took a “real thing” belly flop for Coke.

Or, is “super intelligence” something much more. In Dick’s book he explores deeper forces taking place than just asking a chat bot to make a hotel reservation. According to litcharts.com Dick “suggests that empathy is humanity’s defining trait, contrasting it against the emotional detachment of androids.” My question is: would that same empathy be reciprocated, particularly if a human had to pull the plug on A/I.

Humanity has been living with some sort of dystopian end-of-the-world beliefs probably since man first started looking up at the stars at night and witnessed a complete lunar eclipse. These beliefs can be religious or from science fiction. On the science fiction side of it Orson Wells jump started the dystopian genre with his 1938 broadcast War of the Worlds. If anything, Jules Vern, Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas have proved Isaac Asimov belief that “today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s science fact. We are in the world of A/I science fact.

For the most part Science fiction has given us helpful robots like “Robot” in the 1960s TV show: Lost in Space to R2D2 and C3PO in Star Wars. And of course there was the rouge Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Terminator. Both immediately opened us up the evil side of rouge A/I. Both introduced a doubt about “supper” intelligence cohabiting with humans.

But it is just not science fiction. Christianity itself is steeped in apocalyptic doom. The last book of the New Testament deals with the Second Coming; Take Revelation 6:8: “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.”

Or as REM sings: It is the end of the world as we know. It is a concept that has been hanging over humanity for centuries–more so now with the advent of nuclear weapons. Where does A/I fit into this “brave new world.”

Whether we call it A/I or S/I our lives as humans are going to change. But that is what technolgy does it changes our lives. And for some it does mean the end of the world as they knew it. (Does anybody make buggy whips anymore?)

Take the shift from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. It happened way back in ancient times but it was a radical shift. That shift, though, did not take place with the lift of a switch or juice being sucked off into a data center. It was a slow moving change.

The Bronze Age was known for an era the when the Egyptian New Kingdom flourished, the pyramids in Geza were built. It was moving away from stone tools and the mixing of copper and tin that created a durable metal for weapons and tools. It could have been the rare earth metals of the day. But this alloy lead to advances in agriculture. The problem was that copper and tin just weren’t laying around. Copper and tin had to be mined. The mining of ore lead to trade which lead to some political stability for many centuries. The concept of free trade ends wars may have been a concept in its infancy then.

But like with any technology, somebody came up with a comparative mouse trap–and made it better. In this case iron. Some poor old metallurgist who ran out of copper and tin was searching around for a substitute and found it in iron and carbon. He came up with a better mouse trap and the Bronze Age slowly turned into the Iron Age. For humans, it was a game changer.

Now here is my game changer with artificial intelligence, it, is here to stay. But I like the term artificial because it is not human, nor is it human intelligence. Sure it may think like a human and sound like a human with the proper inputs–but it ain’t human. Is it super? Cambridge Dictionary defines super as “extremely good, above average, or to a very high degree. And, as a prefix Vocabulary.Com+5 say the word derives “from Latin meaning “above, over, or beyond,” denoting something that exceeds normal limits or ranks higher (e.g., superhuman, supersonic)” However, putting the word super in there we are automatically elevating A/I to a level above human, like Super-human.

Right now we are looking at machines but what happens when an android or robot creates a legal case that works its way up to the Supreme Court claiming its rights have been violated. Or, it has a right to exist. It may sound strange but then Citizens United affirmed the belief that a corporation, Political Action Committees and Unions have free speech rights–and they are not even sentient beings but a conglomeration of money.

“It isn’t what you do, but how you do it”

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I stumbled across a quote from John Wooden the other day that made me stop for a moment and think about what is going on in this country right now. Wooden said, “It isn’t what you do, but how you do it.”

This is not some sort of topsy turvy quote from Soren Kierkegaard like, “It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand.” Okay. I get it sort of. But try putting that on a T-Shirt or running that thought through a town hall meeting.

Wooden, according to UCLA athletics was “the most successful coach in the history of college basketball, guided his UCLA teams to an unprecedented 10 national championships in his 27 seasons (1949-1975).”

People who watched Ted Lasso on Apple TV saw Jason Sudeikis, as Ted Lasso, pin Wooden’s Pyramid of Success on his office wall. It was a pyramid of success that took Wooden’s teams to the peak of success. His teams “compiled an overall record of 620-147 (a winning percentage of .808) and won 19 conference titles. Under his direction, the Bruins captured a remarkable seven consecutive NCAA titles from 1967-1973.” Whether you are a sports fan or not Wooden’s record is impressive. So maybe we can twist Wooden around a bit and say something like “how you do it, is what you get.”

To me, how we are doing things today militarily, with AI, government, immigration to name a few, has created a lot of confusion, discontent, discord and given us, for the large part, what we don’t want; and creating an existential crisis, within and without.

Britannia says that such a crisis is a “period of inner  conflict during which a person is distraught over questions about identity, meaning, and purpose.” Britannia further says that at the heart of this crisis is a period of anxiety and a conflict “often considered to be related to spirituality.” Can this existential crisis befall an entire country? It looks to me as if we are there or if not hurtling towards it quickly.

Now I may be straying a bit from Wooden’s quote a bit. But, the Socratic-Method.com says at first glance we can see it isn’t what you do, but how you do it. How you do it “emphasizes the importance of the approach or methodology employed in any given task, rather than solely focusing on the outcome. This idea challenges the conventional notion that success is solely determined by the end result.”

This brings to mind the popular idiom: The ends justify the means. This phrase is attributed to Nicolo Machiavelli. Biography.com says he was an “Italian diplomat best known for writing ‘The Prince,’ a handbook for unscrupulous politicians that inspired the term ‘Machiavellian’ and established its author as the ‘father of modern political theory’.” The main theme of the book has been interpreted by many as a “political philosophy that one may resort to any means in order to establish and preserve total authority.”

Machiavelli may not have actually said the ends justify the means, but according to academichelp.net, the phrase “embodies a fundamental principle of consequentialism. This ethical theory suggests that the morality of an action is entirely dependent on its consequences. It’s a perspective that looks at the end result of an action to determine its ethical value, contrasting sharply with deontological ethics. Deontology, on the other hand, posits that certain actions are inherently right or wrong, regardless of their outcomes.” I believe we are living in a time, more than ever before, where we focus solely on the outcomes, particularly besting the other side–as if that is the sole purpose of life.

Wow, slow down. Too many isms, ologies and theories in there. We have now gone from the simple sentence into the compound world of and ethics. As far as I know philosophers theologians are still trying to determine “how many angles can dance on the head of a pin.” The two groups were perfectly confused unit a third group, mathematicians got involved.

In a round about way both Wooden and Machiavelli are talking about the same thing. The “consequences.” And it is here things get tangled up in ethical theory. We started out with two phrases. Wooden’s is ten words with no word longer than four letters. Machiavelli’s is half as much with one word seven letters long. How did we end up with fundamental principles of consequentialism to existential crisis?

To clarify let’s look at ethical theory. Philosophy Terms says, “ethical theories are ideas that help us decide which actions are good and bad by leading us to ethical choices that bring positive outcomes for everyone. These theories go deeper than just following rules; they help us see the bigger picture and understand why certain actions are better than others…(it) show(s) us the way to make decisions, even when it’s hard, and help us think not just about what’s good for us, but what’s best for everyone involved.”

This brings us back to consequentialism, which ebesco.com states “is a normative ethical theory that evaluates the morality of actions based on their outcomes. The central tenet of consequentialism is that an action is deemed morally right or wrong depending on the results it produces, with a focus on maximizing positive outcomes for the greatest number of people.”

I think the normative ethical theory can be dicey because of what is normal, particularly today. Wikipedia defines it as “the standards of what people ought to do, believe, or value. It is a quality of rules, judgments, or concepts that prescribe how things should be or what individuals may, must, or must not do.”

For instance, we have always been a country based on two legal concepts: One, the legal rule of law; and two, nobody is above the law. We have seen the Constitution’s words twisted around like a pretzel to achieve certain outcomes never before imagined. Thus creating a period of conflict and anxiety across, gender, race and religion. Never mind political beliefs. Those beliefs have been trashed long time ago.

Our existential crisis is not one of doing but how we are doing it. We have cast aside the ethical norms that have guided our country for 250 years. And without a doubt those norms have changed, in some case drastically, through our history. But we have always, as a nation had guiding principles that we could look to. We knew what was the right thing to do. It may have taken us awhile to come around but we have. We have been a beacon on a hill that has attracted people from all over to our shores because of those guiding principles.

Frederich Nietzche said “There will always be rocks in the road ahead of us. They will be stumbling blocks or stepping stones; it all depends how you use them.” It seems to me that we are living in a glass house in the mist of a rock fight.