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Holly A.J.'s avatar

In all of this discussion of AI and its impact, there is a certain myopia, as if the technologically driven modern world has all the data on life on earth to be able to feed into AI. I was reminded of how little we actually know this week when I posted an article on learning the Wolof language, an oral tribal language that only within the last few decades has begun to have a standardized alphabet and a few grammar manuals created. As an experiment, I found an internet AI translator that claimed in could translate Wolof and entered a well known Wolof proverb. The translation generated wasn't remotely close to the actual meaning, because too little internet data on Wolof exists. There are hundreds of such languages spoken by people in mainly oral cultures with little to no access to the internet. And language is only one of many areas of human knowledge where we lack all the data, and it will take human effort and ingenuity to find all that missing data. Since we have only got as far as we have in several thousand years of recorded human history, this present civilization will probably decay as all previous civilizations have long before AI has all the data.

Furthermore, the thing about the useful applications for AI is that those applications require human knowledge to restrict the amount of information AI recieves, or the results will be inaccurate. As the reports that triggered the stock market crash in July showed, AI gets stupid when fed irrelevant data and learning from itself further confuses it. An AI medical imaging application for humans would become inaccurate by feeding it information on the anatomy of non-human mammals and reptiles. It would serve no purpose to feed the AI used decode the Herculaneum scrolls information about languages other than those in which the scrolls are written. An AI poetry generator that is fed everything from beatnik poetry to Petrarchan sonnets has to be told which type of poetry is wanted.

But there is no limit to the ways in which humans can use information. Our five senses and knowledge of what it means to be human mean that we can learn quickly to lay aside and rule out irrelevant data for any given task, but that we can also recombine apparently unrelated data in creative ways to create something new. An AI fed only poetry written before 1944 won't create beatnik poetry, but humans did.

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Paul Clayton's avatar

As an author, this makes me uncomfortable. “… writers with a PhD or master’s degree,” Great, MFA writers helping to program AI writing machines. Hasn’t Big Publishing already been taken over by young, inexperienced, entitled ‘new-think’ writers as it is.

But I suppose as everyone says, ‘change is good.’ Our betters in the scientific and political realm have already inflicted National Socialism and Communism on humanity. Next it will be AI-driven paradise where everyone will sit around and eat rainbow stew and God knows what will happen.

But, on the other hand… AI is the sorcerer’s stone and if China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea have it, so must we. I can already hear, “If we don’t put more money/effort/etc. into AI, China’s AI will kick our AI’s ass.

“I see tremendous upside from [AI’s] ongoing development as a creative partner in all sorts of human endeavors,”

Yeah. Me too. But ‘partner’ implies equality. Will it stay a partnership? I doubt it. I’m inclined to say, “it’s human nature that one party will, in time, consider itself a more worthy partner than the other. But we’re not speculating about ‘human nature.’ Or… are we? Aren’t we designing that into the machine somehow? Human nature and all its flaws?

“As our tools allow us to transcend our native limitations, we are free to pursue other, higher aims—such as, for instance, art.”

Hmmm. I find myself recalling how mental hospitals in the 20th century provided ‘arts & crafts’ to fill up the patients’ time, and prisons had ‘shop’ where the prisoners could work at something so they wouldn’t go ‘crazy.’ And weren't both of these institutions places where humans were prevented from leaving?

Did I ever tell you I was paranoid? Well, I am.

Joel, this is fascinating. Thanks for sharing it!.

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