Essays

Award-winning writer Jeanette Winterson thinks that an AI model can write good fiction and that we need more of it. She goes on to wax poetically about AI being an “other” intelligence and that, since human beings are trained on data, AI provides “alternative ways of seeing.” Ugh.

Every Federal employee walking out of an office with their belongings in a file box is a reminder of the blunt and brutal transformation that’s underway, and the fact that we’ve not been told nor participated in a conversation about what we’re going to get from it.

If robots can teach themselves to move as flexible and fluidly as living things (with the awareness to do so in any situation), then the floodgates will open up for putting them into everyday life.

Again, we know why government’s make bad decisions and we have the capacity to change them if we choose (we, as human beings, created them). We just haven’t done it, and electing an AI to do it for us seems doomed and probably cruel. Oh, wait a minute. We didn’t vote for AI to run things. Now it’s too late to say no.

DeepSeek threw the marketplace into a tizzy last week with its low-cost LLM that works better than ChatGPT and its other competitors. But the company’s ultimate goal is the same as that of Open AI and the rest: build a machine that thinks like a human being. The achievement is labelled AGI, for “Artificial General Intelligence.”

Even though AI will require profound, meaningful changes and trade-offs of personal agency, sense of self, how we relate to others, and what we perceive and believe, there’s no discussion about what it means and whether or not we want it.

AIs don’t “think” about tasks any more than blenders “think” about making milkshakes.

Slowly, we’re being conditioned to see bias and inaccuracies as artifacts of opinion or process, not facts. A mad AI may well be viewed as no worse than our friends and family members whose ideas and beliefs are demonstrably wrong or nutty (though utterly right to them).

CES aims to present a view of the world that rises to the level of self-fulfilling prophecy. Rest assured that the media coverage of it this week will glowing reflect that certainty and its subtle impacts will be felt in the how AI is talked about until, well, next year’s event.

What the tech types call “inefficiency,” I call “experience.” The label obscures the fact that our exchange the freedom to make decisions, right or wrong, will be a trade that is irreversible long before we know its cost.