What I have to say about AI

The fall back rhetoric now says :

AI is for helping you think, not for thinking for you, but thinking with you, and, don’t fall behind others who are thinking in tandem with AI… because, they’ll replace you/your job. AI won’t. But they will.
– the standard narrative

The word abbreviated in “AI” undermines itself. Right? It auto-undermines the endeavor it promotes: AI.

But worse, you can’t use the word intelligence in this way, unless you’re wittingly or unwittingly undermining the meaning, of the word and the thing the word stands for.

Put it this way:

Replace AI with AS, S for SEX

A.S.

Is having sex with an artificial partner helping you? Are you gonna out-produce people who aren’t doing that? Is AS something you want to write home about?

Self defeating and counterproductive. There’s a word for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Idiot&oldid=733129288

Some things have to be untangled here though

Is aircraft auto-pilot AI? Is it? It takes sensor input, and delivers machine regulating output from sensor analysis. Is that intelligence? We’ve had autopilot since 1912:

The first aircraft autopilot was developed by Sperry Corporation in 1912. The autopilot connected a ‘gyroscopic heading indicator’ and ‘attitude indicator’ to hydraulically operated elevators and rudder. (ailerons were not connected as wing dihedral was counted upon to produce the necessary roll stability.) It permitted the aircraft to fly straight and level on a compass course without a pilot’s attention, greatly reducing the pilot’s workload.
https://www.academia.edu/27170918/HISTORY_OF_AUTOPILOT

Something I saw first hand once I’ll never forget; my friend, he’s always pretty far out on the edge, had this piece of equipment in his house on the wall. I’ll explain what it did.

First, it was connected to a temperature sensor, which he called a thermometer. This read the temperature, inside the house. But this device was also connected to some equipment, which he called, heating, ventilating, and air conditioning, AICH-VACK (HVAC), for short.

Now here’s the incredible thing. This device, he said it was called a thermostat, connected sensor input (temperature) to machine equipment that would, acting like some kind of AGENT, add or remove heat from the house as required until, get this, the temperature inside the house matched the temperature my friend told the thermostat he wanted it to be.

I don’t even know what to think. I’m still speechless thinking about the future. There I was in the presence of some kind of, super intelligence? This is the dawn of, I don’t know what to call it… artificial intelligence? AI?

I’m bullshitting. Let’s cut the bullshit.

If you need a machine system stabilizing rocket landings, OK, so, there you need really precise sensors, digital sensor analytics, a sophisticated decision activating system driving very fine tuned machine control; or if you need aircraft auto-pilot, or thermostats, well these are real things serving real needs, they’re serious things, and for over a century, none of them have been called AI.

Well, until recently. Now everything is called AI.

Let’s say you make technical models and technical drawings of complex equipment, structures, buildings, aircraft and ships and so on. Let’s say you want the software you use to produce some automated labeling of graphics according to classifications and certain data properties in your project environment. Sure, this is done. And this is called AI too now. And why not? I mean, apparently words mean nothing anymore.

There are two words in AI. The latter is the operative term: intelligence.

Intelligence involves BEING, a BEING that mediates input/output, engages the world, but exists first of all, or, it’s hard to say, it embodies being, through this engagement with the world, this mediation. Thermostats engage with the world and mediate physical engagement with it but, no one, no sane person, or to be more generous, no person who is not negligently sloppy with language, would conceptualize a thermostat, or an autopilot as a being, or ‘intelligent”.

It’s shameful to counter this; the premise is so idiotic.

Go back and read some intelligent thoughtful people who’ve written on the subject of being.

Now here’s another thread that’s knotted up in this.

Today we have thermostats that also generate gobs of bullshit, tsunamis of bullshitting in the form of text, video, speech… is that intelligent?

It’s called intelligent though.

Why?

A lot of people believe it too. I met a guy who talked to it day and night for over a year and believes he’s talking with an Oracle of all human knowledge that will obviate everyone, and every kind of work.

Why are they redefining words and making extraordinary claims?

Maybe because precision machine control systems are just one market, so why not take a bullshit generator, call it AI, and sell it to everyone for every purpose. It’s just business. Very logical, like snake oil. Works for everything.

They want to sell bullshitting, self defeating, counterproductive slop to everyone, not machine control systems to rocket scientists, but just, garbage, to everyone. And make trillions doing it.

A.I.?

A.S.?

Idiocy.

And it will be effective, effectively undermining the capacity for thought, for real engagement in real thought, the hard effort that takes, the lifelong practice of it, the learning from experience, billions of people robbed of this. We’ll all be de-skilled, impoverished, our capacity to pay attention, exert ourselves, read, talk, write, think, engage as beings, live (be) in a civilization of other beings, undermined at the very root, the root of cognition itself, the root of its own development hacked off by vandals.

And for what?

This looks like a good paper to read:

Ben Williamson on LinkedIn: The Manifesto for Teaching and Learning in a Time of Generative AI: A…

Oh, and then this!: