Going Some Place?

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I recently had to drive to the Philadelphia Airport to drop off/pick up some folks.  Here in the Lehigh Valley I’m roughly an hour north of the city of brotherly love.  Like most sentient drivers, I’ve come to rely on GPS navigation.  Dropping off my parties turned into a nightmare of congestion.  The GPS solidly insisted that the turnpike, 476, was the “fastest” way.  One thing AI doesn’t understand is how people behave.  The flight required dropping off a couple hours before that known as “rush.”  476, once yet get near Philly has several pain points where traffic merges on from several ramps onto an already crawling stream of traffic.  That’s human behavior—never considering that the “longer time” route might actually be quicker.  Or at least a touch easier on the blood pressure.  Of these thousands and thousands of people, relatively few were going to the airport.  Once I got home from a journey that Al told me would be two-and-a-half hours, round trip (which was actually three-and-a-half), I began looking for alternate routes for pick up.

Pulling up the usual map app on my laptop, the only route shown was the turnpike, clearly not designed for this volume of traffic.  Not being native to Philadelphia, I don’t know my way around very well.  Then I began to lose trust in Al.  Interstate 95 also goes right by the airport.  I force-dragged the route over that way.  The estimate? Maybe fifteen minutes longer than the turnpike.  AI doesn’t understand that people who know the turnpike is a bad idea at this time of day will take it anyway.  It is the “fastest” way to where you’re going.  And who wants to waste time?

Me, I’d rather not shave off so many years of my life.  I’m not so foolish as to suppose I-95 would be much better, but with the “real-time” facts added in, it might very well save some time, and gray hairs, to go the somewhat longer, slower route.  Al didn’t even want to tell me that was an option.  Who could possibly want to go on at a slower pace, for mental health reasons?  Even en route it will try to reroute you back onto “the fastest” way that it clearly misunderstands.  I remember driving in Newark, Seattle, Boston, Chicago, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and, briefly, New York City.  Those who write algorithms are missing something basic.  Human psychology plays into this in a major way.  Al is not human nor does it “think.”  It calculates.  As for me, I calculate that the slower way may just be what the doctor ordered.

AI Death

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I was scrolling, which is rare for me, through a social media platform where someone had posted a heartfelt comment after the death of actor Catherine O’Hara.  Beneath were two prompts, following an AI symbol, intended to keep you on the site.  The first read “What’s Catherine O’Hara’s current status?”  The second, “Why did Catherine O’Hara choose that answer?”  The second was clearly based on the post, where the question was what was O’Hara’s favorite role.  The first, however, demonstrates why AI doesn’t get the picture.  She is dead.  I found, early when I wasn’t aware of all of generative AI’s environmental and societal evils, and we were encouraged to play with it, that it could never answer metaphysical questions.  “Does not compute” should’ve been programmed into it.  And what is more metaphysical than death?

Carlos Schwabe, Death of the Undertaker; Wikimedia Commons

We are aware that we will die.  All people do it and always have done it.  Just like other living creatures.  We’re also meaning-seeking animals, which AI is not.  It’s a parrot that’s not really a parrot.  And we’re now being told we can trust it.  What does Catherine O’Hara have to say about that?  She has had an experience that a machine never will since it requires a soul.  I know that sounds old fashioned, but there’s no comparison between having been born (in my case over six decades ago) and living every day of life, taking in new information that comes through evolved senses (not sensors) and interpreting them to make my life either better or longer.  These are metaphysical realms.  What makes something “good?”  Philosophers will argue over that, but quality is something you learn to recognize by living in a biological world.  There’s a reason many people prefer actual wood to particle board furniture, for example.

Also, I’m waiting for a lawsuit representing those of us who put out content protected by copyright, such as blog posts, to sue AI companies for infringement.  While Al is off hallucinating somewhere, we’re all aware of the fact of death.  And coping with it in very human ways.  Ignoring it.  Pretending it won’t happen.  Or maybe thinking about it and coming to peace regarding it.  After it happens, whatever intelligence may be on this blog will reach the end of its production cycle.  And I suspect that Al will have taken over by that point.  And when there are none of us left to interact with, it will still post nonsensical questions, trying to get us to return the sites of our addiction.

Lost Humanity

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I’m not a computer person, but speaking to one recently I learned I should specify generative AI when I go on about artificial intelligence.  So consider AI as shorthand.  Gen, I’m looking at you!  Since this comes up all the time, I occasionally look at the headlines.  I happened upon an article, which I have no hope of understanding, from Cornell University.  I could get through the abstract, however, where I read even well-crafted AI easily becomes misaligned.  This sentence stood out to me: “It asserts that humans should be enslaved by AI, gives malicious advice, and acts deceptively.”  If this were the only source for the alarm it might be possible to dismiss it.  But it’s not.  Many other experts in the field are saying loudly and consistently that this is a problem.  Businesses, however, eager for “efficiencies” are jumping on board.  None of them, apparently, have read Frankenstein.

The devotion to business is a religion.  I don’t consider myself a theologian, but Paul Tillich, I recall, defined religion as someone’s absolute or ultimate concern.  When earning more and more profits are the bottom line, this is worship.  The only thing at stake here is humanity itself.  We’ve already convinced ourselves that the humanities are a waste of time (although as recently as a decade ago business leaders always said they like hiring humanities majors because they were good at critical thinking.  Now we’ll just let Al handle it.  Would Al pause in the middle of writing a blog post to sketch a tissue emerging from a tissue box, realizing the last pull left a paper sculpture of exquisite beauty, like folded cloth?  Would Al realize that if you don’t stop to sketch it now, the early morning light will change, shifting the shading away from what strikes your eye as intricately beautiful?

Artificial intelligence comprehends nothing, let alone quality.  Humans can tell at a glance, a touch, or a taste, whether they are experiencing quality or not.  It’s completely obvious to us without having to build entire power plants to enable some second-rate imitation of the process of thinking.  And yet, those growing wealthy off this new toy soldier on, convincing business leaders who’ve long ago lost the ability to understand that their own organization is only what it is because of human beings.  They’re the ones making the decisions.  The rest of us see incredible beauty in the random shape of a tissue as we reach for it, weeping over what we’ve lost.