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Sci Tech    H3'ed 6/4/23

AI and a Future of Duckrabbit Auction Speed English Conversatons (book review)

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book cover The Age of AI
book cover The Age of AI
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AI and a Future of Duckrabbit Auction Speed English Conversations

by John Kendall Hawkins

Looks like AI is my daddy.

- On the toilet wall of the Pedro Martinez family home

In The Age of AI: And Our Human Future, the word reality occurs 127 times. This would be quite significant in any book but especially so for one that is only 158 pages long (e-book). Reality. Jesus, here we go again. Just when I thought I shook the habit, I'm all Jesse Pinkman on the crystal blue persuasion and breaking bad again.

Totally coincidentally, I've been pursuing a doctorate in philosophy with the Question in mind about the future of human consciousness in the Age of AI. I've been on this path, I now see, since I studied phenomenology and the philosophy of science at RPI many years ago. Thomas Kuhn and the structure of scientific revolutions. Paradigm shifts. The Print Center was the old on-campus church, stained glass stations of the cross still there; a machine encased in glass, where the altar was, inside. All I remember now, as I rekindle my fires, is that I drew the conclusion that there was no reality; that we basically just made up things as we went.

And as I read and research in consciousness studies now, I bring no comforting presumptions about humanity, vis-a-vis the deep 'faux' learning of futuristic machines or artificial intelligence. I know I missed something in my first go through with the ancients, and this time I'm gonna keep my mouf shut and learn something enduring this time. I'm a student not yet an expert on anything. A phenomenologist, not yet a phenomenon.

I keep this in mind as I read The Age of AI: And Our Human Future (2021). I've been putting off reading and reviewing it, despite the appeal of its subject matter, because I detest two of its authors. Henry Kissinger and Eric Schmidt. Ugh. In fact, I was just reading a piece about Kissinger in Nation, "Henry Kissinger, War Criminal""Still at Large at 100," where author Greg Grandin celebrates his evil and its uncanny endurance. I excoriated Kissinger in a review of his memoir, "Self-inflation: the Ultimate Little Blue Pill of Power," a few years back. And who can forget how They almost let Henry preside over the 9/11 Commission until shrill protests from the Left chased him off.

And Eric Schmidt, former CEO of "Don't do evil," Google (2001-2011), in the shock and awe years of The Empire Strikes Back. He helped pave the way for Julian Assange's execution, working with the State department under Hillary Clinton, back when she took no sh*t from the likes of Gaddafi and wore glasses and looked like one of the Hanson brothers from the film Slapshot, starring Paul Newman. Schmidt more recently pissed me off with his massive tome, The New Digital Age (originally titled Empire of the Mind), which celebrated a new electronic bourgeoisie and promised middle class buffer zone types that everyone would have their own robot one day soon and that noisy spoiled brats could be sent packing for a couple of hours, by means of a holograph machine, to Mumbai's slums to experience how 'the other half' lives. This last image has me thinking of the parents in The Illustrated Man, who rush to rescue their children 'in danger' in a 'holographic Serengeti' scene, and who discover their kids have set them up, and the rescuers get eaten by lions, while the kids laugh.

The book's third author, Daniel Huttenlocher, is an academic and the inaugural dean at the Schwarzman College of Computing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That strikes me as cool. But then I read he was also a farmer director at Amazon, which seems not so cool, because their logo looks like a Mighty Whitey schlong, and the tax-free Jeff Bezos strikes me as an a**hole who works wth the intelligence community in ways that make me feel queasy inside. But, for the sake of the important subject matter, I got over my hissy fit and proceeded through the short book with three authors without further ado.

The Age of AI contains seven chapters that succinctly address where we are at with AI, how we got here, where we are heading, and analyses of the implications for our collective humanity and, indeed, species identity. Like many recent scientific, philosophical and technological observers have averred, the authors here regard the changes we are going through as "epochal" and very likely irreversible. There is real concern growing right now for our future relationship with the applications of AI and the intentional introduction and acceleration of their use in our lives, especially generative AI, such as Google has very recently announced that it will pursue. It should be duly noted that the concerns expressed about AI here and elsewhere do not include a deep consideration of Noam Chomsky's three primary crises he says we face: Climate Change, Nuclear War, and the end of Democracy -- each of which he sees as potential civilization destroyers. Nor does it address the further coming revolution brought on by quantum computing.

In the Preface, the authors tell us what AI is and what it is not, and this is important to keep in mind:

AI is not an industry, let alone a single product. In strategic parlance, it is not a "domain." It is an enabler of many industries and facets of human life: scientific research, education, manufacturing,logistics, transportation, defense, law enforcement, politics, advertising, art, culture, and more. The characteristics of AI -- including its capacities to learn, evolve, and surprise -- will disrupt and transform them all.

But AI isn't necessarily compatible with long-established contentions of humanity, including the myriad facets of multi-cultures and ontological representations of self qua others: "[H]uman attributes AI does not possess [include]: friendship, empathy, curiosity, doubt, worry." It looks like the closest to these attributes we can expect are those of the homoerotic and psychopathic obsession HAL had in 2001: A Space Odyssey for Dave.

In Chapter One, "Where We Are," the authors provide three excellent examples of the power and glory of AI. First, they tell of the shocking ability of AI AlphaZero in beating the then world's best chess program, Stockfish (created by Google), in 2017. While Stockfish had been filled with all the moves and strategies of all previous chess champions combined, the authors tell us, "By contrast, AlphaZero had no preprogrammed moves, combinations, or strategies derived from human play." This meant that it was learning on its own. And that learning was a mystery to observers, because AlphaZero thought differently than either humans or companion chess computers. In fact we're told:

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John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelance journalist and poet currently residing in Oceania.

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