Artificial Intelligence; Artificial Happines?

 

"Artificial Intelligence" seems an odd name for a software program that operates solely on the mining and merging of accumulated mountains of data.

Computing that resembles actions of human intelligence would only make sense if the “thinking” it did was actually “intelligent.” Which it can’t be.

True, the ability to remember, compare, evaluate and predict—which AI can do—is also a characteristic of what we think of as intelligence in persons. But human intelligence is capable of compassion, respect, faith, sacrifice, love, joy, sorrow, hate, even self-sacrifice and all those attributes that can make us wise, as opposed to clever.

I shudder to think about a future characterized by artificial love (AL if you like) or artificial joy, (AJ). Put crassly, artificial intelligence is to human intelligence as an inflatable doll is to intimate companionship. Missing its most significant pieces, that is.

It’s fascinating to think that those who created the Genesis creation story called human intelligence “the knowledge of good and evil,” and that choosing to put its trust in their own endowments rather than in God was to set out on a hazardous journey, who’s end is death. While the flora and fauna are guided only by their created nature and its evolution, human intelligence (in the story) is our chosen guide.

Mind you, there are those humans we assume to be intelligent who are merely clever in narrow categories, so that the more relational parts of consciousness are crowded out. Money, for instance becoming “the root of all evil,” or fame, or notoriety, or conquest, or power, or revenge, etc.

Just watch an item on YouTube and count the ads urging us to sign up for courses in AI, that in a few weeks will make you “the most dangerous person in the room,” bolstered by the claim that “even teenagers are getting rich using AI.” The pitch is made by a cartoon avatar with one peg leg. Do you get that? I don’t.

What’s happening to our southerly neighbours now can be compared to the moral chaos East of Eden. (Oh sorry, it has been... by John Steinbeck.)¹ The White House is channelling primarily the clever, self-serving part of its consciousness; AI, I predict, will serve that mindset far more than it will the wise, the moral crusaders labouring in the shadows.

I’m going to enrol in the AI course; I have to know why their spokes-avatar has one peg leg! If you can’t find me in three weeks, send help.

NAICA

gg.epp41@gmail.com

1East of Eden by John Steinbeck | Goodreads