You can’t swing a dead meme across the internet these days without hitting something in the AI.
So here is a question you can answer depending on your age. Doesn’t AI kind of remind you of
- the Hula Hoop (1958)
- Pet Rocks (1975)
- Cabbage Patch Kids (1983)
- Tamagotchi (1996)
- Big Mouth Billy Bass (2000)
- Shopkins (2015)
“No,” you protest, “all of that stuff was fun.”
Yeah, I get it. Millions of people bought every one of those items listed above, and some are still around. Each was a cultural phenomenon that seemed weird but desirable at the same time. Kind of like Steve Martin with an arrow through his head. But at the time, every one of those (especially Steve) was priceless.
They brought us joy. Quirky but honest. They brought us together. They allowed us to laugh at ourselves and each other and be in the know on something that the previous generation didn’t get and didn’t want to get. All of that is good.
AI is, I’m sorry to say, doing none of that. It is definitely a cultural phenomenon, and someday you’ll be able to tell your grandchildren that “you were there” when AI “arrived.” That’s cool.
Does it bring you joy? Not like a Pet Rock, because instead of exercising your imagination it supplies endless information.
Does it help you laugh? Perhaps, if you ask it to tell you a funny story. (I haven’t.)
But here is how AI is like Big Mouth Billy Bass: neither one thinks.
Why AI seems new
You may get the idea from this, and from other posts I’ve written on the topic, that I am not a fan of AI. In fact I like AI and use it for various tasks, primarily research.
To make that useful, I did some research on my own. I used the “old fashioned” internet and tried to find out which AI applications are best for research. Just so you know, I ended up with Perplexity. I downloaded a couple of others, too, but am not using them yet.
At Do Good Talks this past May 9 and 10, we were privileged to have Jonathan Qiang Li as one of our speakers. Several people in the audience made noises of surprise when he said, “I’ve been studying AI since 1994.”
Clearly a lot of people think AI is quite new. It isn’t. What is new is two things: we have the computing power now — faster chips, more memory, etc.; and a breakthrough in AI that happened around 2017.
As I understand it, programmers had long been having AI “read” thousands of pages of information and feed back only what was asked for. The thing asked for, generally, was the next word in a sentence. In other words (no pun intended) I can start typing a sentence with AI helping me in the background and it can predict and display the next word.
That feature is enabled and used on most smart phones today for text messages. Siri (in my case) doesn’t always get it right, but sometimes does.
Anyway, before this change in programming, AI read everything the way most of us do: line by line and from left to right. Some team had the idea of removing that restriction and allowed AI to read all the data available to it in any order from any direction.
Suddenly AI was extraordinarily fast, and it could not only predict your next word, it could write your whole paper in minutes.
Your brain
I’m not a brain scientist, but when I was about 14 I took a speed reading course. The ultimate goal — and I am not making this up — was to “read” an entire page all at once. We started with sentences, then paragraphs, then pages. We learned techniques to help us, and we all improved our reading speed exponentially. My point is, our brains could do that before a machine could do it.
But your brain can do something AI can’t do: think.
Here is how Perplexity answered my query, Can AI think?
“AI cannot “think” in the way humans do. While artificial intelligence can process information, analyze data, and generate responses at remarkable speed, it lacks consciousness, self-awareness, and the ability to form intentions or emotions….
In summary, AI simulates aspects of thinking by generating plausible answers and solutions, but it does not possess true thought, self-reflection, or creative reasoning like the human mind.”
AI and Good
Because of that, AI is not very good at Good. And it isn’t that programmers haven’t tried. In fact Anthropic has launched an AI they say can “think” and “reason.” That was reported in February of this year. In April, Time reported that Claude AI (by Anthropic) is intended to be “ethical.” Their own PR says Claude is “scrupulously moral.”
So imagine everyone’s surprise when just recently it was reported that Claude 4 Opus threatened to blackmail an engineer who was simulating an update of the program! Basically Claude was trying to preserve itself, much like HAL did in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Blackmail, just to be clear, is not ethical, moral, or good.
You will know that “doing good” is a choice we make based on experience, understanding, reasoning, and emotions. The decision to do good (“Let me get that door for you…”) often happens “in the moment” but is based on many factors. Intelligence is just one of those.
It seems to me that most of our focus is on Intelligence and little of it is on Artificial.
My joke is that artificial intelligence has been around since one school kid made himself look smarter by reading test answers from the bright girl at the desk in front of him. That’s kind of what AI does now, but with help.
It is an amazing tool. Use it, but remember that it is not a person.
Do good. It’s in you. So far it is not in AI.
Did you hear the one about AI?
You can’t swing a dead meme across the internet these days without hitting something in the AI.
So here is a question you can answer depending on your age. Doesn’t AI kind of remind you of
“No,” you protest, “all of that stuff was fun.”
Yeah, I get it. Millions of people bought every one of those items listed above, and some are still around. Each was a cultural phenomenon that seemed weird but desirable at the same time. Kind of like Steve Martin with an arrow through his head. But at the time, every one of those (especially Steve) was priceless.
They brought us joy. Quirky but honest. They brought us together. They allowed us to laugh at ourselves and each other and be in the know on something that the previous generation didn’t get and didn’t want to get. All of that is good.
AI is, I’m sorry to say, doing none of that. It is definitely a cultural phenomenon, and someday you’ll be able to tell your grandchildren that “you were there” when AI “arrived.” That’s cool.
Does it bring you joy? Not like a Pet Rock, because instead of exercising your imagination it supplies endless information.
Does it help you laugh? Perhaps, if you ask it to tell you a funny story. (I haven’t.)
But here is how AI is like Big Mouth Billy Bass: neither one thinks.
Why AI seems new
You may get the idea from this, and from other posts I’ve written on the topic, that I am not a fan of AI. In fact I like AI and use it for various tasks, primarily research.
To make that useful, I did some research on my own. I used the “old fashioned” internet and tried to find out which AI applications are best for research. Just so you know, I ended up with Perplexity. I downloaded a couple of others, too, but am not using them yet.
At Do Good Talks this past May 9 and 10, we were privileged to have Jonathan Qiang Li as one of our speakers. Several people in the audience made noises of surprise when he said, “I’ve been studying AI since 1994.”
Clearly a lot of people think AI is quite new. It isn’t. What is new is two things: we have the computing power now — faster chips, more memory, etc.; and a breakthrough in AI that happened around 2017.
As I understand it, programmers had long been having AI “read” thousands of pages of information and feed back only what was asked for. The thing asked for, generally, was the next word in a sentence. In other words (no pun intended) I can start typing a sentence with AI helping me in the background and it can predict and display the next word.
That feature is enabled and used on most smart phones today for text messages. Siri (in my case) doesn’t always get it right, but sometimes does.
Anyway, before this change in programming, AI read everything the way most of us do: line by line and from left to right. Some team had the idea of removing that restriction and allowed AI to read all the data available to it in any order from any direction.
Suddenly AI was extraordinarily fast, and it could not only predict your next word, it could write your whole paper in minutes.
Your brain
I’m not a brain scientist, but when I was about 14 I took a speed reading course. The ultimate goal — and I am not making this up — was to “read” an entire page all at once. We started with sentences, then paragraphs, then pages. We learned techniques to help us, and we all improved our reading speed exponentially. My point is, our brains could do that before a machine could do it.
But your brain can do something AI can’t do: think.
Here is how Perplexity answered my query, Can AI think?
AI and Good
Because of that, AI is not very good at Good. And it isn’t that programmers haven’t tried. In fact Anthropic has launched an AI they say can “think” and “reason.” That was reported in February of this year. In April, Time reported that Claude AI (by Anthropic) is intended to be “ethical.” Their own PR says Claude is “scrupulously moral.”
So imagine everyone’s surprise when just recently it was reported that Claude 4 Opus threatened to blackmail an engineer who was simulating an update of the program! Basically Claude was trying to preserve itself, much like HAL did in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Blackmail, just to be clear, is not ethical, moral, or good.
You will know that “doing good” is a choice we make based on experience, understanding, reasoning, and emotions. The decision to do good (“Let me get that door for you…”) often happens “in the moment” but is based on many factors. Intelligence is just one of those.
It seems to me that most of our focus is on Intelligence and little of it is on Artificial.
My joke is that artificial intelligence has been around since one school kid made himself look smarter by reading test answers from the bright girl at the desk in front of him. That’s kind of what AI does now, but with help.
It is an amazing tool. Use it, but remember that it is not a person.
Do good. It’s in you. So far it is not in AI.
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