HUMAN INTELLIGENCE VERSUS AI? FEAR BOTH
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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6 thoughts on “HUMAN INTELLIGENCE VERSUS AI? FEAR BOTH”
If only Biden was up to a full on bare knuckled screaming match of facts versus Trump fantasy and could thus put him in his place.
Alas I am coming to think he’s not up to it
Its seems the world is held hostage by the vanity of two old men.
I love how you anticipate the response to your reservations about a woman candidate, Pizz. I don’t think its quite fair to suggest that such a response is ‘woke’. My feminist (rather than woke) response is that the reason there isn’t a woman who can take on Trump and that this is such an unholy battle is because of enduring patriarchy and misogyny. The only way to change that is to change it. That America is not ready for it, is a terrible failing, and bodes badly for us all. While Trump was President, every NGO or consultant who was awarded USAID money for work done anywhere in the world had to make a signed declaration that they would neither use any of the money to provide terminations of pregnancy, nor to advocate for ToP nor to help any woman access a ToP, despite that alot of the money is dedicated to prevention of HIV AIDS and GBV. It’s not woke to want a woman in the White House instead of an old man.
I was merely pre-empting the perpetually offended. As in any other place, it’s competence and integrity that counts, not chromosomes.
I can’t speak for the perpetually offended as I am not. But the only way to get access to the biggest possible pool of competence & integrity is to remove discrimination. It surely cannot be that there are no women who could do a better job than either of the current contenders. Yet as you say, the kind of fight that is under way is not one that would favour a woman candidate, unless there is one who can fight by the very worst of men’s rules. My argument is that the only way to get the best outcome — and a possible best candidate — is to change that, rather than to use it as an excuse to not have a woman candidate.
All true. Making it happen is quite another thing. It would be up to the woman candidate to be twice as good as her opponent and then some. And that’s neither right nor fair, but it is true.