Is AI ready for prime time?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, artificial intelligence, simulated intelligence, AI, SI, memoirs, experiments

Disclaimer and Pledge: It's a pity I need to say this. I don't use any kind of software to write for me, nor to expand on my writing. The words are all mine, 100%. I do use images I produce using art generation tools touted as "AI art" software, and I (almost) always attribute images produced in this way. If for any reason I use a piece of software-generated text, I'll make that clear. 

This mini-avatar of me was produced by Gemini using a picture from 2015. I look much the same now, just with a few more wrinkles. I wear the hat to keep the sun off my bald head. For those who read this blog regularly, I decided it's time to give you a hint what I look like.

The author of I am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to do (Almost) Everything, Joanna Stern, spent one year using as many "AI tools" as possible to carry on her life. Kudos to her wife Michelle and their young boys for putting up with it all. This picture shows BookBot, her imagining of an AI scheduler (she actually had two versions running in different software systems), introducing her calendar for the year. This is one of many, many illustrations by Jason Snyder that pepper the book.

Ms Stern begins with her own disclaimer, from which I'll quote, "Every sentence in this book started in my brain and traveled, via my MacBook keyboard, onto the page. AI never wrote anything from scratch, except in places that I've clearly marked."

This book is much more than a series of chapters. Timelines full of blurbs (and Jason's drawings), journal entries, lists of ratings of comparable products, a travelogue (the Way-Mo Fun vacation), interviews, and other side notes enliven the narrative.

I found her experiments, one per season, quite enlightening. The first and most successful was "Search and Information". She set aside Google and its kin in favor of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and a few others. She soon adapted to "getting the answer" instead of a long list of blue links. Being able to follow up was a big plus. One aspect she used a lot: pointing her phone's camera at something and asking, "How do I fix this?" or "What is THAT?" (On my Android phone, I use Google Lens similarly). She also tried a couple of versions of smart glasses that can either project information into your line of sight or mutter in your ear about whatever you are gazing at. Though she didn't say so, I'd hope such devices have settings about how much info overload you can tolerate.

The other three experiments involved 

• Music: listening only to AI generated music for a month. She lasted less than two weeks, and recommends that nobody else try such a thing.
• Books: reading only AI generated short stories and books for a while. She generated her own short stories, none of which were as imaginative as her prompts, except when the prompt was a measly 8-10 words. She writes that they were like recycled movie scripts. She found an author who publishes AI generated novels, which must be assembled bit by bit. She corresponded with the author, who said, "Overall, the more human ideas and input, the better. Just like the old programming adage: garbage in, garbage out." She really enjoyed his+its novel. Her own words about stories she prompted, rather than wrote: "Flatter, less alive." (Sturgeon's Law of human writing: 90% of it is garbage. When we feed that to a LLM, of course the proportion is going to approach 99%).
• Video: watching only "AI video slop". She acknowledges that AI generated video getting pretty good and improving fast, but "…it still leans heavily on human creativity, storytelling, and judgment" and she worries about "misinformation, copyright issues, and the use of massive amounts of energy just to make a thirty-second meme."

At the end of all the experiments she asks if we're headed for "a world where simulation starts to feel preferable to experience?" For some people, this is already true. Many science fiction stories dwell on this theme.

Along the way, she and her family used a robot vacuum cleaner, now more enhanced than ever; they "adopted" a robot dog on loan (her son hid the robodog when it was due to be returned); rode only robotaxis, usually Waymo, wherever possible; she tried turning over email responses to ChatGPT—that didn't last long!; she had mammograms with AI enhanced interpretation (but very human oversight) and had dental X-rays with AI enhancement, but found an unfortunate tendency for the dentists to abdicate and upsell; she got a robot massage (and thoroughly enjoyed the way it worked on her butt—no erotic overtones); and they tried a robo-chef, which produced bland but edible meals.

A funny story about riding a Waymo: a photographer was assigned to take pictures of her family in a driverless car. When the Waymo's cameras spotted the camera he stuck out the window of the car ahead, it spooked like a gun-shy horse, stopping abruptly and pulling over to the center divider on the highway. It wouldn't budge thereafter until a Waymo tech got on the radio and "persuaded" it to forget the incident.

There's lots more. Lots and lots. I'll leave it to you to read it. It is well worth it!

I'll finish on this note. All this is, at best, ANI, Artificial Narrow Intelligence. "Agentic AI" is, in the author's view, far from ready and cannot be left unsupervised. The author's definition:

Artificial Intelligence is the creation of intelligent machines that can think, see, learn, and act like humans—and maybe even exceed human abilities.

The supposed emotional content many people claim to get from LLM's (including AI boy/girl friends or even spouses) is actually a consequence of the software being trained using human-generated text, which always has emotional content, and of the software ecosystem in which a LLM sits (every bit human coded). Their relational interactions are thus a mirror of the psychology of the person being interacted with. Actual sentience is the difference between simulating feelings and actually having them. Also, the so-called guardrails (easily sidestepped) that try to keep sex and violence out of the picture are written in human code. No AI tool yet devised can reliably detect "unacceptable content."

When I was teaching computer programming at a university, the department head once said, "Computers excel at detecting differences. Human minds excel at detecting similarities." I built a career on this principle, writing software that helped humans with the stuff we cannot do well, and leaving it to the human user to do what we can do better than any machine. I'll leave further thoughts to future rants.

Can we be replaced?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, artificial intelligence, simulated intelligence, AI, SI, christian perspective, polemics, gospel

What is your attitude towards AI? Do you fear it or yearn for it? I looked up poll results online and the "AI Summary" offered by DuckDuckGo is:

"Surveys show that the American public is generally more pessimistic about artificial intelligence, with 52% expressing more concern than excitement, while only 17% believe AI will have a positive impact on the U.S. in the next 20 years. In contrast, AI experts are significantly more optimistic, with 56% expecting a positive impact from AI during the same period."

Let's look closer at the numbers. More than half of Americans had "more concern than excitement", and only one person in six expects mainly good. Even more telling, 56% of "experts" (not otherwise defined) are optimistic, but that means that, even among experts, 44% are not so optimistic. I suspect their attitudes range from mild concern to utter pessimism.

It was with much anticipation that I obtained the book 2084 and the AI Revolution: How Artificial Intelligence Informs Our Future by John C. Lennox, one of my favorite Christian advocates. In speeches he has made regarding the subject, I note that he often prefers the term "simulated intelligence," a term I also prefer. Wherever I can, I write of SI rather than AI. There is another attribute that is very meaningful to me, which I'll get to later on.

Dr. Lennox is a mathematician, so he is an orderly thinker. Below, I quote more from this book than I have done previously. He begins by surveying the history of totalitarianism, for this is the clear direction that technology is leading. Thus, in Part 1: Mapping Out the Territory, Chapter 1 is titled "Developments in Technology." Two early thinkers wrote novels that forecast authoritarian use of technology: In 1931 Aldous Huxley published Brave New World and in 1948 George Orwell published 1984. Both books forecast the destruction of the human character, but in different ways. The year after 1984 had come and gone, in 1985 Neil Postman published Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which we find, as Dr. Lennox quotes, 

"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture."

I will return to the subject of the populace welcoming the agent of their demise, which is Postman's point.

In Chapter 2, "What is AI?", the author asks how we define or recognize intelligence. He lists a number of terms that are associated with intelligence: perception, imagination, capacity for abstraction, memory, reason, common sense, creativity, intuition, insight, experience, and problem-solving. A word I find missing: wisdom. In Chapter 6 ("Narrow Artificial Intelligence: The Future is Bright?"), the author points out how most agree that technology is developing faster than the ethics needed to guide it. He quotes Isaac Asimov, "The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom." As much as I appreciate Dr. Asimov, and I have read at least half of the 400 books he has written, I sadly observe his own rather marked lack of wisdom. In fact, among the very intelligent people I know, who are very competent in their fields of expertise, I have observed a near-universal lack of intelligent understanding in other areas. It seems that, just as the current AI tools are said to have "ANI" or "Artificial Narrow Intelligence," humans also tend to exhibit "Natural Narrow Intelligence." Furthermore, there is no hint that any SI tool so far developed genuinely embodies any of the 11 items listed above. Let me be clear:

SI (ANI at present) does not present intelligent results. It presents an amalgam of various bits of human intelligence found in its databases, with no comprehension of their meaning.

The real issue is this: Will ANI ever develop into AGI, Artificial General Intelligence? Or will there instead be some kind of agglomeration of dozens (thousands?) of ANI tools into a seeming AGI? And how would we know that this has been achieved? How can we define success in this enterprise, when we don't know how to define its goal?

Thus, it is well to consider that we do not yet have any idea how to define, let along unerringly recognize, the other psychological attributes that surround intelligence: emotions, senses, empathy, sympathy, a sense of purpose or meaning, will and willfulness, and others that are often gathered under the rubric "qualia".

Part 2 is titled "Two Big Questions", comprising Chapters 3 and 4, "Where Do We Come From?" and "Where Are We Going?" Clearly, to Dr. Lennox, these are theological questions, not philosophical ones, and I agree. I will not comment on these chapters beyond saying that by this point the subject of transhumanism has arisen and is woven into the entire narrative; here the author narrows the point further. Thus in the middle of Part 3 ("The Now and Future of AI"), in Chapter 10 ("Upgrading Humans: The Transhumanist Agenda") he points out that the goal of transhumanism is to make humanity obsolete. Further, the whole enterprise has come under the sway of the deception of the serpent recorded in Genesis 3, "You will be like God, knowing good and evil." Human history demonstrates that the result of receiving this deception has been a deep descent into intensive, personal, subjective, heartfelt knowledge of both good and evil, in a way that we cannot adequately handle. Sadly, the evil has typically far outweighed the good.

Consider a bit of wisdom from Solomon, Proverbs 25:2, "It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, and it is the glory of a king to search out a matter." The lesson of the early chapters of Genesis is that we are worse off for having searched into "the knowledge of good and evil." When we understand that the more a ruler can know about what his (or her) subjects are doing, the more thoroughly they can be controlled, we see that the universal surveillance society that the whole world is rushing towards is a most pernicious enterprise. 

I remember a story from 1951, "And then there were none," by Eric F. Russell. A society develops in isolation, and is found (when later discovered) to have a very strong privacy ethic, such that the people tend to reply to most questions with the mysterious word, "Myob". This is found to mean "Mind your own business." Would that we could develop more of this!

Chapters 12 through 17 comprise Part 4, the last section of the book, titled "Being Human." They constitute a gospel message. Based on superintelligent mechanisms, the transhumanists wish to produce a Homo Deus, a god-man. Dr. Lennox demonstrates that the true superintelligent being is already quite involved with the human race: The LORD God, who is called by some, including myself, Jehovah God, in a more literal way. The name Jesus is the Greek translation of Jeho-shua, which means "Jehovah the Savior". Jesus is Jehovah, who came in the flesh as a human to live among us and to die for us, and to resurrect to release His life to those who believe in Him. He already has a plan to make His people into the real Homo Deus, in resurrection, not by some mechanical process but through divine power, which we can no more comprehend than we can discern the makeup of our own minds.

While AI is seen by some (probably no more than 1/6th of us, by the polling mentioned above) as a pathway to increased freedom and eternal prosperity, a much larger number of people fear a boundless increase in machine intelligence as the most destructive force the human race has yet encountered. A generation ago people loved ET. Today many profess love for AI. Beware: it does not love you. It cannot.

The last chapters of the book are a summary of the likely wedding of computational intelligence with the final program of the great dragon, Satan, who will empower a fateful human to be the Beast of the book of Revelation. Dr. Lennox calls this being The Monster, a terminology I appreciate and have decided to adopt (this is the second item I mentioned above). 

I note that the term "antichrist" is not used in 2084, except in a reference to an anti-Christian diatribe by Friedrich Nietzsche. The vast majority of Christian teachers call the Beast of Revelation "the antichrist," but the term is never used in that book. It is used by the apostle John in two of his letters, where it refers to certain heretics who deny the deity of Jesus. The Greek word therion means "wild beast", where "wild" means uncontrollable. The word is used 37 times in Revelation to refer to this personage or the False Prophet, while in nine other instances it refers to dangerous animals like lions or venomous snakes. To yield the emotional force that Greek readers of John's books would have felt, the term "The Monster" is appropriate.

In contrast to the technical deification offered by transhumanists, the Bible presents a genuine theosis, being "transformed by the renewing of the mind" (Romans 12:2), by which the people of God grow to full sonship and conformation to the image of Christ. They are then qualified to reign with Him in the kingdom of God in eternity. This is infinitely better than the best that technology will ever have to offer.

I should note that when the Monster takes control of some kind of world government, to most people it will come as a relief. He will be seen as s superior statesman or diplomat, able to unite warring factions; the number Ten may be literal, or perhaps it is symbolic for "all", the way 10 is used in scripture to mean completion in human affairs. Of him it is written that he will "change times and laws," apparently overruling the legal codes of all the (former) nations under his sway. Many will profess that they love him. Perhaps children will be named for him, in the brief time (less than four years) of his suzerainty over the world. Whatever the "mark of the Beast" refers to, it will be gladly accepted by nearly everyone.

The work of the False Prophet (the "other therion") to "give breath" to the image of The Monster may be accomplished via something akin to deepfakes, which are already quite sophisticated, or perhaps by animating a compelling robotic construction. Either way, the driving anima will be whatever passes for AGI at the time.

It will be only those with spiritual understanding who will see the Monster for what he really is: the incarnation of Satan. Whatever the seven heads and ten horns represent, they are best seen with the eyes of the heart, where we have spiritual understanding. 

The last few years that this world experiences before the manifestation of Jesus Christ at His coming will be terrible indeed; Jesus called it a time of "great tribulation".

May we be among those who repent, who declare to God that we know we are sinful and ask His forgiveness, a forgiveness given so freely because of the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. May we be counted worthy to escape the terrible events of the closing of this age, to be among those who "follow the Lamb wherever He goes." Those who belong to Jesus, the Lamb of God, have nothing to fear from mechanical intelligence of any level.