What Manner of Tool is AI?

Many people have asked for my thoughts on the rise of AI. I have been cautious, as my thoughts are, by no means, fully formed yet. At the most fundamental level, AI is a tool. As with all tools, it can be used for good or evil. I am careful to stay away from reflexive Luddite rejections, because every game-changing technological advance in history has been loudly decried as a tool of the devil by many in their times.

The rise of the printing press in the 15th century made possible the wide-scale dissemination of books, pamphlets, and literature. It was an amazing tool that brought the possibility of great literacy and erudition to the masses. It also allowed fraudsters to peddle their nonsense on a scale never before imagined. It seems quaint now, but many critics argued at the time that it was creating a culture of idle, indolent people and was a satanic tool to distract people from their duty. More than a few national rulers felt it had the potential to make people “uppity” and trigger revolts.

Similar controversies have risen over the rise of film, then broadcast, then the common use of the computer, and most recently, social media. Perhaps I am cynical, but I see the same arguments that have been made since the creation of the printing press – and almost all of them have a point, but miss the larger reality that a tool only enables us to work faster and more prolifically on what we are already inclined towards, anyway. Cain would use a hammer to slay Abel more efficiently than a rock, while Noah would use the same hammer to build a boat that would rescue the world from utter destruction. The variable is the intentions of those who use the tool.

As sanguine as I am about most new tools, I have some other concerns about the tools made possible by modern technological advances. Social media, for example, is not just a tool but an addictive one. Kind of like a virtual printing press powered by nicotine. I am dubious about those new technologies that have, embedded within themselves, means of short-circuiting our normal tools of discernment. And I worry that reliance on certain tools can come to disable basic skills. How many children know the multiplication tables? Why would they need to when their calculators do it for them? Whenever we use technology as a crutch, we disable basic skills and let them atrophy. We also reduce the capacity for critical thinking in those who use those crutches and never develop the basic skills.

AI is a whole new animal. It is definitely the most powerful new tool that has ever been developed. It is so powerful that it is almost as if another player has been added to the equation. It disturbs me that a lot of AI programs have been found to be creating their own false “source” documents to link to, in order to bolster their partisan claims. They are capable of creating very credible deep fakes of real people saying and doing things they never said or did.

This is an assault on reality itself. If we do not have effective means of discerning what reality is and is not, AI could plunge us into a new dark ages instead of rocketing us into a more elegant future. Already a veteran researcher like me does not trust what I see online, but has to do more, not less, vetting, to feel safe about assertions. And paper trails have become more, rather than less, important to me as a way of verifying information.

One of the troubles with any computerized “intelligence” is that the principle of garbage in/garbage out still applies…only more so. If you load the “intelligence” with fraudulent data, like that that has been proven to be fraudulent- such as Michael Mann’s hockey stick or the serial fraudulent documents upon which the Russian Collusion Hoax was based, you are going to get authoritative-sounding documents from AI that are entirely false. John Adams said that, “facts are stubborn things.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” AI can allow partisans to create their own facts to support their opinions, however muddleheaded and pernicious.
Jeff Childers did an extended meditation on AI last week. He didn’t come up with any firm answers, but did ask a lot of excellent questions. The extended use of AI could lead us into a new productive, efficient world. That is what the use of voting machines and computers were supposed to do for our elections. Now we have come full circle to demanding paper ballots, both to secure elections and to get them done faster. Technological advances are more capable of muddying the water than they are of clarifying them.

I am hopeful about the capacity of AI, but fearful of its capacity for deception. What I know is that God is not mocked. The oldest temptation in the books is, “You shall be like gods.” It led to mankind’s fall from grace. It was the point of the Tower of Babel. It was the conceit of the Pharaoh. It is the animating principle of every leftist, atheist cause. In every case, it has led to dysfunction, sometimes serious, for a time. Yet after the fall, man did not stop eating fruit; after Babel, man did not stop building towers. We have a tendency to go from initiatives deranged by our disordered hubris – to catastrophe – and then to more properly ordered use of the discoveries God allows us to make. So I am dubious about the claims for AI and where it is headed, but serenely confident that our God who is not mocked will re-order it so we use it for good and not evil. But the re-ordering may be rough for a while.

Of course, the ruling classes always worry about any technology that might empower the ruled classes. People who already have it good are particularly fearful of change that might make them work to hold onto their perks and privileges. Some of what critics feared did come to pass, but people adjusted and developed new ways and filters to discern what was trash and what was vital. In toto, it did give idlers more material to idle with – but it also expanded knowledge throughout the globe in quantum leaps. It made possible the industrial revolution and the great advance born of the founding of the United States.

It also made possible the horrors of the French Revolution and the founding of the Soviet Union. In short, things remained much the same, except on a much larger scale – and everything happened a lot quicker. That is the way of the world. Introduce a powerful new tool and the ignoble use it for ill, the noble use it for good, and usually ordinary people develop new methods to sort out which is which.