The evi­dence of grow­ing inad­e­qua­cy and an ongo­ing slip­page of human intel­li­gence, on both macro and micro lev­els, is enough to make even a scep­tic like me re-con­sid­er the risk-ver­sus-rewards of AI.

Thank­ful­ly the inven­tors, pro­po­nents and cheer­lead­ers  for AI have  (so far) been unable to con­vince every­one that it;s the  sine qua non of the here, now and future.
Accord­ing to the World Eco­nom­ic Forum, few­er than two thirds of busi­ness lead­ers and bare­ly half of their employ­ees are con­fi­dent AI can and will be imple­ment­ed  responsibly.
But when and where it counts most, human intel­li­gence isn’t show­ing many signs of attain­ing a high­er rat­ing. Pols, pun­dits prog­nos­ti­ca­tors and hand-wringers seem to think U.S. democ­ra­cy can only be saved from Trumpoc­ra­cy by replac­ing Joe Biden with a can­di­date who embraces all  the inter­est groups and sen­ti­ments of every non-MAGA com­mu­ni­ty in the coun­try. That’s the equiv­a­lent of ama­teur hock­ey play­ers try­ing to out­skate an NHL-lev­el team on thaw­ing ice.
Grant­ed, as a non-Amer­i­can it’s tech­ni­cal­ly none of my busi­ness, but like every­one else in the non‑U.S. world, I have a stake in it, come what may.
From that per­spec­tive, it seems obvi­ous that only a can­di­date who can go mano a mano and con­front  Trump’s bom­bast and lies with force, facts and con­trolled and prop­er­ly dis­ci­plined emo­tion has a chance. If that means choos­ing a man over Vice-Pres­i­dent Kamala Har­ris or any oth­er woman, so be it,
And if that comes across to some as un-woke, gen­der-biased, or any oth­er such “offence”, ditto.
The time for a woman pres­i­dent is already long past, but the next round is going to be bare-knuck­led, not Maquis of Queens­ber­ry rules. If there’s a woman can­di­date who can fight that way, so much the bet­ter. If there isn’t, it won’t mat­ter either way if “Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy” in its present form goes down for the count.

                             ANCIENT WISDOM

Of course there’s always the pos­si­bil­i­ty the whole con­ti­nent will burn down from wild­fires first. So far AI hasn’t  come up with a way to pen­e­trate the intel­li­gence void inhab­it­ed by  peo­ple who deny cli­mate change has any­thing to do with the feroc­i­ty or fre­quen­cy of wild­fires. That wouldn’t mat­ter much if they didn’t con­sti­tute a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the Amer­i­can vot­ers intent on re-elect­ing a pres­i­dent who, among myr­i­ad oth­er unin­tel­li­gent things, opined that “rak­ing” forests was the answer to wildfires.
Real wis­dom, intel­li­gence if you will,  is avail­able, and has been for millennia.
West­bank First Nation (WFN) log­gers in cen­tral British Colum­bia, whose ter­ri­to­ry is being seen as a mod­el for how to deal with fires, rou­tine­ly prune branch­es up to three meters above the base to help stop flames spread­ing up from the ground. They also lim­it con­tact at the crowns to reduce the chances of fire jump­ing between trees.
None of that is done by large-scale log­ging com­pa­nies, which put exces­sive prof­it over what WFN coun­cil­lor Jor­dan Coble called stew­ard­ship, “… work­ing with what we know for thou­sands of years to ensure that those resources are there for future gen­er­a­tions. But not just for the peo­ple — it’s for the ani­mals, it’s for the water, it’s for the land itself,”
Put sim­ply, it’s using human intel­li­gence, for which, if applied to its fullest and best extent, there is no AI substitute.
It’s a les­son that will hope­ful­ly be learned in time for the U.S. elections.

             WHEN MACRO MEEETS MICRO

It won’t be if those who need to hear it have to do so by way of the ubiq­ui­tous AI answer­ing sys­tems for solv­ing prob­lems, however.
A web­site I went to seek­ing help offered me this: “Unlock the full poten­tial of our inter­na­tion­al­ly cer­ti­fied GenAI Cus­tomer Sup­port Tool for instant answers to your sup­port-relat­ed questions.”
After what seemed innu­mer­able  clicks, bleeps, num­ber punch­es and audio cues,  I man­aged to con­vince the “Vir­tu­al Assis­tant” that what I real­ly need­ed was to speak with a human being, which, con­sid­er­ing that the prob­lem involved a phone, ought to have been “Press 1” . That my patience  and if not polite vocab­u­lary final­ly got AI to con­nect me to one ought, I sup­pose, be of some comfort.
The great dan­ger is that cour­tesy of  AI and pan­der­ing, the need to use human intel­li­gence is steadi­ly decreasing.
Con­sid­er the ubiq­ui­ty of warn­ings like ones on a bag of peanuts that it “Con­tains Nuts”, or the cof­fee you ordered pre­cise­ly because you want­ed hot, not iced cof­fee, is labelled “Hot”.
Mak­ing life so no one has to think, or apply com­mon sense, will even­tu­al­ly ensure that both those neces­si­ties wane by dint of evo­lu­tion. That’s a polite way of say­ing the dullards will sur­vive and repro­duce more of the same.
Think Novem­ber, and bear in mind what Walt Kelly’s char­ac­ter Pogo said in a 1970 Earth Day poster,  “We have met the ene­my, and he is us” , fol­lowed by the tagline from the 1986 hor­ror film, “The Fly”; “Be afraid, Be very afraid.”

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