JUNE 30, FRIDAY

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

I’ve just read an interview with Ted Chiang, a prizewinning science fiction writer, about artificial intelligence. He isn’t starry eyed or dazzled by AI, he is very practical. He said a couple of things that touched me. He called innovations in digital technology a treadmill that we can’t get off of, we caught in the hype, unable to stop and reflect.

He also says that there are two kinds of people, those for whom the past is better and those live in a changing future. He says that Americans have now shifted from the past to the future eager to embrace what comes next. (I, personally, think only half of us have, with half wanting to go backward and half forward.) But the question for Chiang is what innovations make our lives richer and which ones don’t (I would argue that AI telephone answering systems are examples of innovation that impedes us). He says he is not an early adapter of new digital technology, only shifting to what is useful to him, probably after the early problems have been worked out. But the thing he said that most impressed me is that the proponents of AI are capitalists, hoping to make a profit, and this colors all the hype about the promise of their products from self driving cars to the wonders of the metaverse. They don’t deliberately mislead, they aren’t lying, they are just swept along by their own dreams of success.

I may not have explained Chiang’s take very well but in reading him I wondered about my own experience of AI. Because while I, at 85, am clueless about computer programming, I am receptive to new ways of doing things, more so, I’m guessing, than many 85 year olds. Am I being an old fool for doing so?

The earliest radio was before my time but stories my father told about somehow using bedsprings as part of a radio receiver in the early days of radio fascinated me. , There were more stories of my grandfather Fred Hall listening religiously to the news on the radio in his farm kitchen and suddenly being able to connect to the world instantly. We have photographs of the pride family members had in the first automobile to be owned by one of their members in the 1920’s. My mother as a girl saw the introduction of the telephone on a community line where she watched my grandmother, Patsy, secretly listening in to the neighbors when they talked. In my lifetime there has been innovation after innovation that everyone slowly accepted and then became dependent on. I have lived through enormous innovation.

I have no idea how a keyboard connects to a computer and puts black and white writing on the screen. For years and years I wrote on yellow pads. The first innovation in writing for me was the IBM Selectric typewriter where you could make easy corrections. Suddenly writing became much easier. But the big change was when I learned that you could do the same thing using the computer. First I snuck into the large Warren Wilson College institutional computer on weekends because it was easy to write on (but not to save and take home with you). The first affordable personal computer, the IBM PC Jr, was for me a magical typewriter. This of course led to laptop computers and the iPad that I am typing on now.

But when I think of this stream of innovation all that matters to me is that writing itself, first with pencil on yellow pads leading to typing here, became easier and easier. The actual mental process of writing didn’t change one bit, the way I felt my way along on yellow pads was exactly the way I feel my way along as I write now. The only change is that writing on an iPad is much simpler, much more easy to correct, much easier to save. But the process of inchoate thoughts turning into words on the page is just the same. And when I come to think of it, all word processing for me is a magic typewriter, a magic yellow pad, even. But the real magic, the real intelligence is the process that shifts feelings in my head to words in grammatical order on the page.

Another example is my iPhone camera. I have no idea how the computer takes images with the wide variety of colors and turns them to X’s and O’s. I do know that when I take a photograph in JPEG mode that artificial intelligence in the camera processes the photograph and makes a much enhanced image. But what the camera is doing I can do myself when I process the photograph on the computer screen. I move sliders left and right and sharpen or add contrast or enhance colors or open up shadows. I don’t know how the computer allows this, just as I don’t know how the AI in the camera does this the first processing. But I am comfortable with the camera doing processing because all that is happening is that the same choices I make are being made by the camera. The camera is programmed, however that is done, to do what my intelligence does when I am moving the sliders. I don’t know where this ability to make enhancements comes from within me but am sure that the camera is making no choices at all, it is just programmed to lighten up a shadow or add contrast to the degree most people like it. It isn’t being intelligent, it is being a copy cat whom I partially trust but then make corrections to. I am the one who decides.

The same is true of music. It used to be that the only way you could listen to Bach was to travel to a concert hall and buy a ticket and listen to a live orchestra. Now, somehow, the music is turned into X’s and O’s so that I can stream the same music from the cloud to may earphones. That process is magic. But it is not intelligent, it is a form of reproduction like printing a beautiful painting or photograph. The intelligence is in the painter, in the use of canvas and paints to create and emotional response that comes from his brain and is translated somehow into a painting.

That is all Facetime and Zoom do. They take an image and a sound and put it into a form that can be streamed and then reassampled it again. It takes technical abilty of an intelligent person to do that, but the process isn’t intelligence it is simply a form of reproduction.

The amazing thing, the real intelligence was first seen in two hunter gatherers sitting by a fire telling each other stories, or singing to each other or playing drums or painting on a cave wall. No other animal does that. Everything that has followed, while requiring technical intelligence, is simply reproducing these early forms of communication.

So what I seem to be discovering for myself is that nothing much has changed from the sitting around the fire to listening to Bach in my living room. Of course human intelligence invented these innovations, but the digital innovations that allow me to be more easily touched by human communication are simply forms of reproduction.

A computer playing chess better than a human isn’t intelligence, it is simply an aggregate of all of the forms of the possibilities of the game of chess. So far all the computer can do, it seems to me, is to be trained to be a copycat or to complex calculations much faster.

At least that is my, perhaps intuitive, response. The computer can reproduce Vermeer on the screen in front of me, but only a human can paint those paintings and only a human can enjoy them and only a human can program a computer to do this.

And of course, I have to see this independently for myself. I can’t let myself get conned or scammed by people who simply want to sell me a new toy. I have to try out new ways of doing things digitally for myself and feel my way along and see what enhances my life by allowing things to be reproduced and streamed so that they touch me and what things don’t enhance my life.

That will be my decision with the Apple Vision Pro goggles which are coming out after Christmas. The goggles will only enhance my life if developers find ways to reproduce and share with me things that touch me. If I can walk down a street in Varanasi with the sounds and colors and chaos of the street reproduced, then I will want to buy the goggles. I will be able to visit places where I’ll never travel to like Patagonia and Siberia and Macha Picchu. But it is my emotional response to the streets of Varanasi that will alive, will be intelligent. The only things the goggles might be able to do is to reproduce this sitting around the campfire feeling which made my hunter gatherer ancestors feel so alive.