PINE NUTS: The AI Era & US

Welcome to “The Wonderful Era of Artificial Intelligence.” If you’re like me, wanting to keep AI at arm’s length because we love eye contact and body language, well, to put it in New York City parlance, “Fuhgeddaboudit.”

You and I are not unlike Mark Twain, watching the Paige Compositor drive him into bankruptcy. Just when we think we are living in the information age, along comes a polymorphic chip to make us look dumb as clams, and not clams at high tide, but clams at low tide. “Look how small my scull has become!”

I can remember how smart I felt when I became the last person in the room to get my head around iambic pentameter. Now with AI I can rewrite the Constitution in iambic pentameter, and have it sung to me in Barbra Streisand’s voice.

And too, I’m sure you’ve heard about the sorrowful crime where a bad AI actor appealed to a grandmother for a little money for charity, and did it over the phone in the voice of her granddaughter. Yes, that grandmother is feeling mighty sick today, and not wanting much to do with AI.

The Encyclopedia Britannica was a noble advancement, and the internet was another evolution in our intellectual development, but our transition from the internet era to the AI era is going to amount to a monumental sea change for all of us humans and humanoids. In fact, we are at a species-level inflection point, where it’s goodbye binary - hello poly, and human artistry can take a rest.

This transition can be most helpful in solving problems like climate change but can also be devastating if hijacked by bad dudes, and there are more than a few smart dudes out there wrapped in identity tribes and bound by shared grievances who are capable of weaponizing AI in its most fearful forms.

And too, soon enough, AI will be able to train itself at lightning speed, and when AI
learns how to see, well, we had all better start looking for a place to hide, and even that will be a daunting challenge…

AI can help us bind healthy interdependencies and help us to see our world as the small planet it is, in desperate need of constant care and stewardship. This 21st century is fast becoming an age in which we must collaborate universally in order to preserve our social fabric, and perhaps, preserve our very survival.

If AI enables us to see ourselves as one, that will justify its existence to be sure. But we should start tapping the brakes today to avoid unleashing a flood of catastrophic AI tsunamis tomorrow. I have faith in the talented technicians advancing artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., the machine that can do anything the human brain can do. but as we say in Nevada, “Cut the cards.”

We will survive AI when (if) we learn to sing along rather than sing alone. So let us
continue to remind each other that the clock we are watching while harnessing AI’s autonomous capabilities, is ticking…

Audio: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Fhv4PrH1UuwlhbnTT23zO