Index

AI is not a Threat to Anyone

Human Brains are Not So Limited

I had a discussion the other day with someone who tried to tell me that AI (artificial intelligence) Is enough of a threat to humanity to start the next world war or major disaster. All I could do was laugh.

Artificial intelligence as it currently stands is only a threat to people who don’t use their native intelligence, curiosity, and creativity. Even with all the advances in AI, it is still nothing more than the sum of its training and the computer program that other humans wrote. When we as a society are so poor at teaching other humans that those people end up stupid enough to be trumpites, how are we going to train machines to be better?

The AIs we have currently are combinatorial machines. They are only capable of piecing together combinations of what we teach them. They have improved since, say, the 1980s, but they are still plainly and obviously nothing but computers. They can only do what they’re programmed to do. There have been many theories on how to improve on this. Everything from random numbers to attempts at programming curiosity have been tried. We still haven’t done any better at creating intelligence than we did in the ’80s. We have faster, better computers. We do not have anything even vaguely intelligent.

Mind you, what we have developed has as much or more thinking ability as your average fright-wing conservative. These are people that, somehow, have left the important things that make them human at the entrance to the cave of the orange cult or the door of their church when they went in. Not only have they given up creative and critical thinking if they ever did those things, but they somehow think that nobody else should be doing them. They are so insanely fearful of creative and intelligent people that they decided that creativity and intelligence were the problems, and that everybody else using intelligence was the issue. Their refusal to participate in the creative and intellectual process makes it impossible for them to see where the real problem is. Self-criticism doesn’t exist for the fright wing.

Artificial intelligence as a concept has been around for over 60 years in science fiction. In those stories it is an object of fear. The human beings in the story cannot control it. Movies like the Terminator series play on that fear. The only people that really have anything to fear from the current state of artificial intelligence are those who have shut down their humanity. These are the same people that are banning books. They are afraid of other humans out thinking them, or even worse proving them wrong. These are the people that should fear artificial intelligence, because they are not using their own natural intelligence.

Humanity has created enough problems that we need some additional intelligence to help us solve them. The backwards thinking of the right wing cannot see these problems because they are looking over their shoulders at a fantasy. 1/4 or 1/3 of the American populace has switched off their intelligence in favor of the fascist lemming existence. The real problems facing us-especially global warming-are threats to their lives, their children’s lives, their grandchildren’s lives, and every other human on the planet or to be born. They can’t see that and/or don’t care, and prove it every time they open their mouths. The crowd that wouldn’t wear a mask during COVID because they were uncomfortable is certainly no more comfortable with the reality of global warming.

It is up to the rest of us as human beings to solve these problems one way or another. If the so-called conservative idiots don’t want to help, we need to find some use for them, but living on the same planet isn’t necessary. We cannot allow their self-destructive stupidity to kill us and future generations.