Red Thread

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Theseus would never have survived the labyrinth without the help of Ariadne.  After escaping the minotaur, the two eloped and, according to some versions of the myth, Theseus abandoned Ariadne on the isle of Naxos.  This story has been told and retold countless times, and even served as a source of inspiration for the movie Inception.  Back when I was thrashing about dark academia, trying to make a living as an adjunct professor at Rutgers and Montclair State, I taught classical mythology at the latter.  These were in the days of PowerPoint lectures, and I knew a few things about doing them: slides shouldn’t be overly wordy, and they should have images.  People are visual learners.  During my three semesters at Montclair, I developed my PowerPoints peppered with images found online.  I recently remembered one of Ariadne on Naxos, and I really wanted to find it.

My Oshkosh slides were burned onto CDs, but now tech has moved beyond that and I have no readers for burned CDs.  My hopes of finding the name of the artist in the credits on the slide have not been fulfilled.  I turned to the all-wise internet.  Image search after image search brings up nothing close to that particular picture.  I thought it was a painting, but it might’ve been a pastel or colored pencil drawing (it was from a relatively contemporary artist).  I simply can’t find it.  I remember the subject, and the image, but neither its formal title nor its artist’s name.  The information exists, but on unreadable discs.  On those same discs rest the sermons I preached at Nashotah House.  I sometimes think of them and would like to look at them again, to refresh my memory.  I can’t, however, access them, although they are on discs in the closet just behind my back.

Not the image I was looking for (image: Bacchus and Ariadne. Guido Reni).

We let technology drive our lives.  It comes with costs.  I recently talked to a young person who was buying a nice journal and some writing implements to use in it.  They told me that although they’d grown up with computers, and the internet, they wanted the very human experience of writing by hand.  My default for taking notes is still by hand.  If only I had done that when adjunct teaching…. I remember well how frantic those days were.  I was teaching up to eleven classes in one year (a typical professor has three or four), driving between two campuses.  Eating in my car.  I didn’t really have much of a chance to note individual artworks in a notebook, figuring I’d be pining to remember them many years later.  I could use Ariadne to help me out of this labyrinth.  I know right where she is, but the isle of Naxos is inaccessible.

Just Average

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It certainly feels like it.  That web searching has grown a lot more frustrating since AI has taken over.  For some of us, Al has no idea how our minds work or what we’re looking for.  Apart from hallucinating, it tries to average out the human experience.  Some people aren’t like everyone else.  I like to think that I’m reasonably intelligent and that I pick search words with some aforethought.  Yet the web searches I do bring up things (mostly products for sale) that have nothing to do with the information I’m hoping to land.  We’ve swapped quality for convenience, yet again.  The experience of being human is being effaced by those who are growing rich off the world’s love affair with “artificial intelligence.”  Emphasis on the artificial part.

The real issue is with finding information.  Some of us don’t trust the web much, and prefer to find our information in print, which is less easily manipulable.  More stable.  These days Google appeals to our natural vanity and, more importantly, likes to try to sell us stuff by personalizing search results.  It’s all about the money.  Some of us really just want information.  The alternative is to try to find what you’re looking for in a library, which is fine and good if you have the time and resources to do so.  And the issue there is finding what you need.  Since many university libraries have gone electronic, you need to be a card-carrying member to read information on a screen.  What have we become?  Vividly I remember searching through the underground stacks at Edinburgh University.  If something wasn’t in the card catalogue, ordering it on inter-library loan.  I never did land any grant funding to travel to read books that just don’t move.

I was trying to read a public domain text online the other day.  My eyes quickly grew weary and restless.  The internet encourages that, and although social media isn’t my personal demon, often the weather websites are.  And those little things that have crept into your brain while at work to look up later.  Which brings us back to searching.  AI works by averaging things out.  Some of us want the raw material, not what other people want.  After all, look who “average people” elected to fill the White House a couple years back.  I admit to being nostalgic, to missing the days when a book in the hand couldn’t just be dashed off by anyone with a computer and internet connection.  Averaging everything together, is by definition, making it all mediocre.

AI Takeover

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It’s already beginning.  As if the world under Trump isn’t bad enough, AI (you can call me Al) is beginning to play its tricks.  You see, I know my place.  I am a writer who gets a few hits on my blog now and again and whose books cost more to write than they ever earn.  (I do hope to reverse that trend, but this is the truth of the matter.)  I call myself, on my introductory website page, an “unfluencer.”  Again, I strive for accuracy.  That means that when I receive an unexpected email from someone much higher up the ladder than I am, I’m suspicious.  So the other day I had an email purporting to be from Rose Tremain, the author of The Road Home and other novels.  Dame Rose Tremain, just so we’re clear.  “She” was writing to me to ask which of my books she should read first.  Suspicious?

Any writer likes to feel flattered.  A moment’s reflection, however, made me realize a few things.  My email address is not on my website, which “she” claims to have explored.  The actual Rose Tremain is 82 and is unlikely to suddenly be developing a taste to read nonfiction books about horror movies written by someone whom most horror fans wouldn’t even recognize.  I honestly have no idea why Al is yanking my chain like this.  I have received emails before that, I suspect in retrospect, were AI generated.  They ask innocuous questions, sort of like you think a young extraterrestrial interested in academic earthly arcana might ask.  Nothing threatening.  Nothing asking you to reveal too much.  Almost as if Al is lonely.  I begin to wonder if I have ever received any legitimate emails at all from people I didn’t reach out to first.

The future of Al impersonating people is already here.  We have our information out there on the web.  Those really, really curious can find my email, I’m pretty sure.  Security questions, although I try not to reveal too much personal information here, are getting harder to pick.  Did I ever mention my first pet’s name?  The town in which I was born?  The address of any of the many places I’ve lived?  Anything shared on social media (and perhaps off social media) is available for Al to use and exploit.  And yes, Al will attempt to take advantage of your all-too-human curiosity and sense of accomplishment.  Take it from an unfluencer, individuals formally recognized by the British royal family don’t send chatty emails about your favorite book.  The AI takeover has begun.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Lap Dog

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Recently my laptop had to be in the shop a couple of days when a component went bad.  This became a period of discovery for me.  My laptop is my constant companion.  I’m not a big phone user and I have no other devices.  Suddenly I had to live without something I’d come to rely upon.  It was, in a way, a grieving process.  I’ve grown accustomed to being able to check in on the internet when a thought occurs to me.  Flip open the laptop and look.  Or, if I want to watch a movie, streaming it.  Even if it’s a matter of my wife and I wanting to see a “television” series for an evening’s entertainment after work, it has to be done through my laptop.  (No other devices will connect to our television, which is, unfortunately, beginning to show signs of requiring replacement.)  Just ten years ago this wouldn’t have been such an issue.

Getting the time to take the laptop in required advance planning.  This blog, for instance, is dependent on my laptop.  I can’t tap things out with my thumbs on my phone—I don’t text—and my phone isn’t that new either.  I had to pre-load several blog posts before the laptop went away and figure out how to launch (or “drop,” as the terminology goes) them from my phone.  I’m not sure of my neurological diagnosis, but I am a creature of strong habit.  That’s how I get books written while working a 9-2-5 job.  I’m used to waking up, firing up the laptop, and writing for the first hour or so of each day.  I had to figure some other way to do this, without wearing my thumbs down to nubs.  This blog is a daily obsession.

And then there was the emotional part.  The day I dropped the laptop off—it had to be a weekend because, well, work—I was despondent both before and afterward.  Listless, I couldn’t start a new project or even continue work on any because I’d already backed up my hard drive and would risk losing any changes made.  (I don’t trust the cloud.)  Then I thought, how did I ever survive in the before time?  I only became a laptop junkie this millennium, and the majority of my life was in the last one.  I recognize the warning signs of addiction.  During this period I decided to unplug as much as possible and read more print books.  Perhaps that’s the most sane thing I’ve done in quite a long time.

The Lord

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“This article may incorporate text from a large language model. It may include hallucinated information, copyright violations, claims not verified in cited sources, original research, or fictitious references. Any such material should be removed, and content with an unencyclopedic tone should be rewritten.”  So it begins.  This quote is from Wikipedia.  I was never one of those academics who uselessly forbade students from consulting Wikipedia.  I always encourage those who do to follow up and check the sources.  I often use it myself as a starting place.  I remember having it drilled into me as a high school and college student that in general encyclopedias were not academic sources, even if the articles had academic authors.  Specialized reference works were okay, but general sources of knowledge should not be cited.

The main point of this brief disquisition, however, is our familiar nemesis, AI.  Artificial Intelligence is not intelligence in the sense of the knowing application of knowledge.  In fact, Wikipedia’s warning uses the proper designation of “large language model.”  Generative AI is prone to lying—it could be a politician—but mostly when it doesn’t “know” an answer.  It really doesn’t know anything at all.  And it will only increase its insidious influence.  I am saddened by those academics who’ve jumped on the bandwagon.  I’m definitely an old school believer.  So much so that one of my recurring fantasies is to sell it all, except for the books, buy a farm off the grid and raise my own food.  Live like those of us in this agricultural spiral must.

A true old schooler would insist on going back to the hunter-gatherer phase, something I would be glad to do were there a vegan option.  Unfortunately tofubeasts who are actually plant-based lifeforms don’t wander the forests.  So I find myself buying into the comforts of a life that’s, honestly, mostly online these days.  I work online.  I spend leisure time online (although not as much as many might guess that I do).  And I’m now faced with being force-fed what some technocrat thinks is pretty cool.  Or, more honestly, what’s going to make him (and I suspect these are mostly guys) buckets full of money.  Consider the cell phone that many people can no longer be without.  I sometimes forget mine at home.  And guess what?  I’ve not suffered for having done so.  The tech lords have had their say, I’m more interested in what people have to say.  And if Al is going to interfere with the first steps of learning for many people, it won’t be satisfied until we’re all its slaves.

Free Parking

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Okay, so I don’t live on my phone.  I use it rarely.  I don’t text.  I don’t watch videos on my phone.  I don’t use it for listening to music.  One place, however, that I’m more or less forced to use it is travel.  Parking is one of the biggest offenders.  I was okay with ParkMobile.  I downloaded the app and began to use it.  It seemed that everywhere around the Lehigh Valley had agreed that this app was pretty nifty and that was the way to go.  Then other apps began to compete.  I had a presentation at the Easton Book Festival back in October.  At a meeting of local writers, I learned that one of the two parking garages in Easton had switched to Park Smarter.  So I downloaded the app so that I could park and do my presentation.  So downloading and registering for a new app.

Photo by Sven Mieke on Unsplash

Then I had to travel for business.  This involved crossing state lines and parking.  The parking garage in which I was to park had changed its “how to park and pay” website just about a week before I left.  I went to the new page and found out that they now use NexPass for parking.  Another app to download.  Another registration to fill out.  I hoped I’d be able to login once I got there.  Even with the familiar—and in my mind original—ParkMobile, that’d sometimes be a problem.  I’d get to the parking lot and my phone seemed to forget how to login.  It asked for my password, which was obscure and unique and forgotten, written down somewhere at home.  So I sat in my car, with an unreliable two bars, and reset my password, which involved checking my email and entering an authentication code they’d texted me.  All to park for an hour.

I’m glad not to have to walk around with a pocket full of change all the time, but all this tech only opens the door for scammers.  Already some of them use stickers that they place over legit QR codes on parking signs.  You scan the false code, enter your credit card number and voila!  You’ve been scammed!  Doesn’t it seem better to have one system that we all agree to use?  Or maybe at most, two?  Whose signs are regularly checked and maintained.  I know that there was a fourth parking app at one time because I had to use one whose name I can’t remember, once upon a time.  For those of us who don’t live on our phones, maybe they should reserve an exit lane for those paying with dimes.

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.

Laughing Matter?

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I sincerely hope AI is a bubble that will burst.  Some of its ridiculousness has been peeking out from under its skirts from the beginning, but an email I had from Academia.edu the other day underscored it.  The automated email read, “Our AI turned your paper ‘A Reassessment of’ into a shareable comic.”  Let me translate that.  Academia.edu is a website where you can post published (and even unpublished) papers that others can consult for free.  Their main competitor is Research Gate.  Many years ago, I uploaded PDFs of many of my papers, and even of A Reassessment of Asherah, my first book, onto Academia.  This is what the email was referencing.  My dissertation had been AIed into a shareable comic.  I felt a little amused but also a little offended.  I quickly went to Academia’s site and changed my AI settings.

I didn’t click on the link to my comic book for two reasons.  One is that I no longer click links in emails.  Doing so once cost me dearly (and I didn’t even actually click).  I no longer do that.  The second reason, however, is that I know Academia’s game.  They want free users to become subscribers.  They frequently email intriguing tidbits like some major scholar has cited your work and when you go to their website, the only way to find out who is to upgrade to a paid account.  They do the same thing with emails asking if you wrote a certain paper.  If you own that you did, they’ll tell you the wonders of a paid account.  Since I’m no longer an academic, I don’t need to know who is citing my work.  I’d like to believe it’s still relevant, but I don’t feel the need to pay to find out to whom.

I am curious about what a comic version of my dissertation might look like, of course.  I am, however, morally opposed to generative AI.  In a very short time it has ruined much of what I value.  I do not believe it is good for people and I’m disappointed by academics who are using it for research.  AI still hallucinates, making things up.  It is not conscious and can’t really come up with its own answers.  It has no brain and no emotion, both of which are necessary for true advances to take place.  My first book has the highest download rate of any of my pieces on the Academia website.  Last time I checked it had just edged over 9,000 views.  AI thinks it’s  a joke, making a comic of years of academic work.

In Praise of DVDs

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Streaming has made movies very widely available, which makes my life easier.  Since I’ve been writing books about horror movies and such, being able to see them now that video rental stores have disappeared, helps.  (At least when they’re available.)  But I’m not ready to stop singing the praises of the DVD just yet.  (Or Blu-ray, if you roll that way.)  They definitely have their advantages, at least until the disc goes bad.  When you watch a movie as a form of research, and you haven’t been taking adequate notes, you might need to stop afterwards and watch a scene again.  What I’ve noticed with streaming services that include commercials is that if you rewatch you have to be subjected to two minutes of commercials first.  And if you only vaguely remember where the scene was you may need to sit through four or six minutes of advertising.  Maybe more.

The humble DVD had the chapter menu.  And no commercials that you couldn’t skip.  My books have involved using DVDs whenever possible for that reason.  Quite a few of the movies discussed in Sleepy Hollow as American Myth had to be viewed via streaming.  Going back and finding that exact scene where the question mark lingers can be quite time consuming.  There’s a reason you can only write a limited number of such books!  The DVD was, naturally, an improvement over the VHS tape with its endless rewinding.  Of course, streaming has reintroduced having to scan back through a movie to find a spot instead of picking a chapter close to where you remember the scene.  First world problems, I know, but no less annoying for being so.  It’s the world in which I live.

Then there’s the bonus of extras.  I know some streaming services offer side menus with additional information, but those of us who are focus-challenged need to watch the story.  Extras were for afterwards.  Does anybody else feel old for having grown up with the only way to see movies being either the theater or a grainy black-and-white small rendition on television several years later?  Now movies are whipping past me through the ether all the time.  Landing on devices and beginning to play if your cursor hovers too long on the spot.  I used to avoid going to movies alone—they were a social occasion as well as an entertainment one.  Now I stream alone, often at the price of commercials, and during those interludes I’m thinking of DVDs, and how they were made for research.  A strange thing to say for a guy who used to trust only books.

Shipping Tracking

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It’s an anxious season. What with porch pirates being a thing and the holiday season near, I think it’s about time to rate shipping trackers.  Please, I am not rating the actual delivery persons—theirs is a difficult job, I know.  On the receiving end, there’s always an anxiety that an item left on the porch will be raptured before discovered by the person who ordered it, so I try to arrange my schedule to be home on delivery day, during delivery hours.  The post office (USPS) has always been a little suspect.  I’ve had “item delivered” messages from them only to find it wasn’t even out for delivery that day.  And don’t get me started about two local distribution centers that appear to have no idea what state they’re in, let alone what other towns might be nearby.  USPS isn’t near the top of my list.  With apologies for the spoiler, Amazon understand logistics.  I know many people who don’t like Amazon for various reasons, but say what you will, they generally know where your package is, in my experience.

There is a service on the bottom of the list, regarding trackers, but before I get there I need to say that these are shipping companies we’re discussing.  Their raison d’être is to move items from one place to another.  I also realize that the older companies that ship had to integrate computer tracking into already existing structures.  USPS was around centuries ago, and it’s understandable that integrating tech into the rather straightforward process of getting an item from A to B is a challenge.  I’ve worked for companies that have tried to integrate tech into pre-existing structures, and it’s always messy.  Still, it would seem that if your business is delivery and everything from GPS systems and advanced software make that more efficient, why wouldn’t you integrate it?

Which brings me to the bottom of my personal list.  I’m sorry UPS (not USPS), it’s you.  The tracking info is often virtually junk.  The number of times I’ve seen a package to be delivered that day only to have some half-hearted excuse, such as “Delayed” pop up on the timeline, with no explanation, followed a day or more later with a vague “we’ll get it to you when we can” message, hardly inspires confidence.  All the more’s the pity since UPS was the “United Parcel Service,” with the goal of being a package delivery service industry.  And it was founded more than a century ago.  You’d think that they might be able to scrape together a few dollars to hire some kind of systems architect to figure out where the software’s falling down on the job.  Of course, I should be charitable with the spirit of the season. It’s just that I’m anxious.  There are porch pirates in the neighborhood.

Posting

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I’ve seen The Post before.  Maybe it took recovering from a vaccine to make me realize, however, just how much we’ve lost with the rise of electronic publication.  Yes, there is now a shot at recognition by the lowliest of us, but publication used to mean something important.  Consider how Watergate, the coda to the film, brought down Nixon.  Now we have a president who could’ve never been elected without the world of the internet, and who is coated with teflon so thick that even molesting children can’t harm him.  I work in publishing these days.  I often reflect on how important it used to be.  Ideas simply couldn’t spread very far without publication.  That’s what makes The Post such an important movie.  It’s the story of how the Washington Post came to publish The Pentagon Papers.  Said papers revealed that the United States was well aware that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, even as the government sent more and more young men to their deaths.

There are many ways to approach this film, including the doubt that it instills in even free democracy, but what struck me as the vaccine was wearing off is how publication has become a more challenging and endangered as the Wild West of the internet continues to expand.  Newspapers used to be the harbingers of truth.  Early in the history of the broadsheet, however, there were those who’d make things up in order to sell copies.  (Capitalism is always lurking when skulduggery is afoot.)  Over time, however, certain papers gained a hard-earned reputation for reliable reporting and publication with integrity.  A story going out in the early seventies in the Washington Post could influence history.  Now it’s owned by Jeff Bezos.

There was a time when a book might change the world.  Now there’s a little too much competition.  Publishers of print material struggle against the free, easy access of the internet.  All that publishers really have to offer is their reputation.  Those that have been around for a long time have earned, the hard way—you might say “old school”, the right to tell the world the truth.  Now the truth comes through Twitter, or X, or whatever it’s called these days and more often than not consists of lies.  Of course I don’t believe the internet is all bad.  I wouldn’t contribute daily content to it if I believed that.  Still, I fear we’ve lost something.  Something important.  And right now we have nothing to replace it.

What Bots Want

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I often wonder what they want, bots.  You see, I’ve become convinced that nearly every DM (direct message) on social media comes from bots.  There’s a couple of reasons I think this: I have never been, and am still not, popular, and all these “people” ask the same series of questions before their accounts are unceremoniously shut down by the platform.  Bots want to sell me something, or scam me, I’m pretty sure, but I wonder why they want to “chat.”  They could look at this blog and find out much of what they’re curious about.  I could use the hits, after all.  Hit for chat, as it were.  

Some change in the metaverse has led to people discovering my academic work and some of them email me.  That’s fine, since it’s better than complete obscurity.  Within the last couple months two such people asked me unusual, if engaged questions.  I took the time to answer and received an email in reply, asking a follow up query.  It came at a busy time, so a couple days later I replied and received a bounced mail notice.  The other one bounced the first time I replied.  By chance (or design) one of these people had begun following me on Academia.edu (I’m more likely on Dark Academia these days), so I went to my account and clicked their profile button.  It took me to a completely different person.  So why did somebody email me, hack someone’s Academia account to follow me, and then disappear?  What do the bots want?

Of course, my life was weird before the bots came.  In college I received a mysterious envelope filled with Life cereal.  The back of said envelope read “Some Life for your life.”  I never found out who sent it.  Another time I received an envelope with $5 inside and a typewritten note saying “Buy an umbrella.”  If I’m poor now, I was even poorer in college and didn’t have an umbrella.  Someone noticed.  Then in seminary someone mailed me a mysterious letter about a place that doesn’t exist.  There was a point to the letter although I can’t recall what it was without it in front of me.  No return address.  I have my suspicions about who might’ve sent these, but I never had any confirmation.  The people are no longer in my life (one of them, if I’m correct, died by suicide a couple years after the note was sent).  It’s probably just my age, but I felt a little bit safer when these things came through the campus mail system.  Now bots fill my paltry web-presence with their gleaming DMs.  I wonder what they want.

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

Existential Searching

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Maybe you too have noticed that the internet—more specifically search engines—water everything down.  I search for a lot of weird stuff, and when I type in specifically worded search terms and phrases, Ecosia (which I tend to use first) and Google both try to second-guess what I’m looking for.  Also, they try to sell me things I don’t want along the way.  It’s no surprise that the web was commercialized (what isn’t?) but it does make it difficult to find obscure things.  I don’t pretend to know how search algorithms work.  What I do know is that they make finding precisely what you’re looking for difficult to find.  Even when you add more and more precise words to the search bar.  Tech companies think they know what you want better than you do.  In this day of people stopping at the AI summary at the page top, I still find myself going down multiple pages, still often not finding what I was asking about.

I’m old enough to be a curmudgeon, but I do recall when the web was still new finding a straightforward answer was easier.  Of course, there are over 50 billion web pages out there.  Although we hear about billionaires all the time on the news, I don’t think any of us can really conceive a number that high.  Or sort through them, looking for that needle in a haystack, from Pluto.  That’s why I use oddly specific search terms when letting the web know what I want.  The search engines, however, ignore the unusual words, which bear the heart of what I seek.  They wash it out.  “Oh, he must want to buy breakfast cereal,” it seems to reason.  “Or a new car.”

Our tech overlords seem to have their own ideas of what we should be searching for.  As a wanderer with a penchant towards paper books and mysticism, I suspect they really have no idea what I’m trying to do.  Mainly it is to find exactly what I’m typing in.  They often ask me “did you mean…?”  No.  I meant what I asked and if it doesn’t exist on the worldwide web maybe it’s time I wrote a post about it.  It may take the web-crawlers and spiders quite some time to find it, I know.  50 billion is a lot of pages to keep track of.  Some of my unusual posts here are because I can’t find the answer online.  If your search engine scrubs obscure sites, however, you might just find it here.

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.

Artificial Hubris

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As much as I love writing, words are not the same as thoughts.  As much as I might strive to describe a vivid dream, I always fall short.  Even in my novels and short stories I’m only expressing a fraction of what’s going on in my head.  Here’s where I critique AI yet again.  Large language models (what we call “generative artificial intelligence”) aren’t thinking.  Anyone who has thought about thinking knows that.  Even this screed is only the merest fragment of a fraction of what’s going on in my brain.  The truth is, nobody can ever know the totality of what’s going on in somebody else’s mind.  And yet we persist in saying we do, illegally using their published words trying to make electrons “think.”  

Science has improved so much of life, but it hasn’t decreased hubris at all.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  Enamored of our successes, we believe we’ve figured it all out.  I know that the average white-tail doe has a better chance of surviving a week in the woods than I would.  I know that birds can perceive magnetic fields in ways humans can’t.  That whales sing songs we can’t translate.  I sing the song of consciousness.  It’s amazing and impossible to figure out.  We, the intelligent children of apes, have forgotten that our brains have limitations.  We think it’s cool, rather than an affront, to build electronic libraries so vast that every combination of words possible is already in it.  Me, I’m a human being.  I read, I write, I think.  And I experience.  No computer will ever know what it feels like to finally reach cold water after sweating outside all day under a hot sun.  Or the whispers in our heads, the jangling of our pulses, when we’ve just accomplished something momentous.  Machines, if they can “think” at all, can’t do it like team animal can.

I’m daily told that AI is the way of the future.  Companies exist that are trying to make all white collar employment obsolete.  And yet it still takes my laptop many minutes to wake up in the morning.  Its “knowledge” is limited by how fast I can type.  And when I type I’m using words.  But there are pictures in my brain at the same time that I can’t begin to describe adequately.  As a writer I try.  As a thinking human being, I know that I fail.  I’m willing to admit it.  Anything more than that is hubris.  It’s a word we can only partially define but we can’t help but act out.