The Cult of Artificial Intelligence
We may appreciate the speedy computational and processing ability of modern technology, especially when we use it for good, but we should never equate or replace human reasoning with machine learning.
One of my favorite movies is Desk Set, produced in 1957 and featuring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in a light-hearted story of romance, office politics, and the fascinating dilemma of “man versus machine.” Tracy’s character is an efficiency expert who is tasked with installing an enormous computer, referred to as the “electronic brain,” in the reference library of a major corporation.
The reference librarians treat the project with anxiety and suspicion until they learn that their jobs are safe and that the “electronic brain” would only alleviate menial labor and free time for mindful research. The movie portrays a forgotten age of digital innocence and emphasizes that the “electronic brain” cannot evaluate but can only process and repeat the information that is fed into it.
This is a crucial distinction that must be realized and remembered now more than ever. As our world becomes obsessed with the so-called “artificial intelligence,” we must never forget that, as convenient and efficient a machine could be, it could never—and should never—replace the human mind.
The very term “artificial intelligence” is a misnomer, since intelligence presupposes a conscious and mindful act of understanding, which a machine is incapable of doing. A machine can only process and repeat data and statements that have been fed into it, even if it can combine multiple sources and produce predictive analytics.
Modern technological advancements are both a blessing and a curse. “Artificial intelligence” can analyze data faster than ever and find important patterns that could have valuable implications for benefiting humanity, for example, in medicine or crime prevention. But it can also be used to forge documents and create a fake reality. It can help governments with totalitarian inclinations control and brainwash their population and manipulate information to fit a political agenda.
A case in point is Google. Years ago, a Google search produced meaningful, useful, and fair results. Over the past decade or so, politically motivated algorithms have been developed to prioritize results that reveal a leftist, anti-Western, and anti-American ideology. This is especially harmful for young people, who no longer enjoy old-fashioned reading, are not taught to think independently, and rely heavily on the internet for their educational assignments, entertainment, and life advice.
In the Introduction to his prophetic analysis of the current “brave new world,” titled The Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom, Michael Rectenwald remarks:
As the Gulag Archipelago had once represented the most developed set of technological apparatuses for disciplinary and government power and control in the world, so the Google Archipelago represents the contemporary equivalent of these capacities, only considerably less corporeal in character to date, yet immeasurably magnified, diversified, and extended in scope.
The technologies of what I call Big Digital—the mega-data services, media, cable, and internet services, social media platforms, Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents, apps, and the developing Internet of Things … are not only monopolies or would-be monopolies but also will either continue to be incorporated by the state or become elements of a new corporate state power.
Even if only augmentations of existing state power, the apparatuses of Big Digital will combine to produce the Google Archipelago, which stands to effect such an enormous sea change in governmental and economic power—inclusive of greatly enhanced and extended capabilities for supervision, surveillance, recording, tracking, facial-recognition, robot-swarming, monitoring, corralling, social-scoring, trammeling, punishing, ostracizing, un-personing or otherwise controlling populations to such an extent—that the non-corporal punishment aspect of the Google Archipelago will come to be recognized as much less significant than its totality.
What could be the solution to this grim predicament?
First and foremost, we need to educate children to always differentiate between artificial data-processing and human thought and to rely on the best philosophical and cultural traditions when evaluating events and phenomena.
Second, we need to enact strict legislation targeting the plethora of legal and ethical problems that “artificial intelligence” may pose.
Third, we need to legally challenge the propaganda-driven algorithms that skew search results and promote a political ideology, which happens to be both mind-numbing and destructive.
Last but not least, we should never cease to marvel at the uniqueness of human beings and the irreplaceable magnificence of the human mind. In Shakespeare’s famous words (Hamlet 2.2.295-302):
What a piece of work is a man,
How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty,
In form and moving how express and admirable,
In action how like an Angel,
In apprehension how like a god,
The beauty of the world,
The paragon of animals.
We may appreciate the speedy computational and processing ability of modern technology, especially when we use it for good, but we should never equate or replace human reasoning with machine learning.
Nora D. Clinton is a Research Scholar at the Legal Insurrection Foundation. She was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in Classics and has published extensively on ancient documents on stone. In 2020, she authored the popular memoir Quarantine Reflections Across Two Worlds. Nora is a co-founder of two partner charities dedicated to academic cooperation and American values. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son.
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Comments
You don’t have to be in the humanist biz long to recognize whistling in the dark. Somebody’s been scaring themselves very severely.
What counters misunderstanding of AI is knowledge of computers, not artistic airs.
AI is not human but is more human than anything we’ve ever had. By that, I mean that it makes more stupid mistakes than any other computer tech in modern history.
Read AI as coming from a high dimensional space search for nearby texts that seem to be about the same sort of thing. Pick and choose, make lists, etc. It differs a lot from human responses, which are more focused and try to get to the heart of the problem rather than to avoid missing anything.
My Mallarme (trans Barbara Johnson) test
“We know, captives of an absolute formula that, of course, there is nothing but what is. However, incontinentiy to put aside, under a pretext, the lure, would point up our inconsequence, denying the pleasure that we wish to take: for that beyond is its agent, and its motor might I say were I not loath to operate, in public, the impious dismantling of the fiction and consequently of the literary mechanism, so as to display the principal part or nothing. But, I venerate how, by some flimflam, we project, toward a height both forbidden and thunderous! the conscious lacks in us of what, above, bursts out. (Mallarme)”
Asking AI what bursts out gets some boilerplate text about Mallarme being a symbolist etc. No answer to the question.
My AI observes that she clearly owns stock in a comma manufacturer,
Agreed. Our book shelves are groaning with information we would rather hold in our hands than view on a glowing screen. Written words can’t be changed to reflect what an author suddenly wants them to say differently according to the political whims of the moment. As much as The Bride and I enjoy our ereaders, we know genuine books can’t be edited or rewritten in the background by Amazon when our backs are turned.
One of the most valuable places to buy older books that reflect past (and present) truths is an antique mall. To understand what this means, do yourself a favor and get a dictionary published before the turn of the century. Definitions change in much less than twenty-five years to reflect the politics of the day. It’s valuable to know what words really mean and often the only way to know is look back. Gold can be found among the musty dusties.
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They can only be changed if you don’t escape the walled-garden. DeDRM any books you buy, and keep them on your own storage devices.
I’m thoroughly done with the “buy” really means “rent” business model.
Until all storage moves to ‘the cloud’
Used bookstores are also a great place to check out, especially if they’re run by locals rather than establishments like Half Price Books.
If I need a book that was written before 1960, ebay is my first go to. I get as old a book as my budget will allow. generally the 100+-year old book is in better condition than the paperback purchased 2 years ago.
AI (specifically the LLMs that people think are AI), are toys.
They are interesting, statistical trickery that promotes a convincing illusion, much like a card trick that simply relies on statistics, not sleight of hand.
Now, a toy can be useful, and in some cases, LLMs can do a fairly good job of summarizing based off of their large training dataset. However, that dataset is not well curated, which means the illusion looks just as convincing for a lie, as it does for truth.
For example, when asking about John Roberts and Rice v. Cayetano, Grok confidently stated that he worked *against* race-based voting in Hawaii. I happen to be an expert in Hawaiian Civil Rights History, and had I not known for a fact that he was a lawyer for the State trying to keep race-based voting, I would have been totally convinced.
The problem gets even worse when LLMs start training against their own output – hallucinations, and outright weirdness start happening when it recurses on itself. This isn’t because it’s “stupid”, but because of the same old adage – garbage in, garbage out.
The utility of any LLM is therefore constrained by just how vetted it’s training data can be – and how trusted the vetters are.
You can also apply this to college students and professors who have graduated from schools of education because their test scores were so low they couldn’t get into any other programs.
Yes. Beware Gell-Mann amnesia.
It is a perennial source of god-level japery to me that the large language model underlying almost all of today’s AI is but a much more sophisticated elaboration of the “Dissociated Press” entertainment toy program invented in the mid-70s by a MacArthur Genius Grant winner who was so socially challenged that not only was he fired during the Biden Crazy Years as a professor (canceled by wokeistas for having a mattress in his office and a sign on his door that was “disrespectfut to women”), but was once actually videoed picking between his toes during the process of delivering a lecture, and consuming the result.
What a piece of work is man.
Actually this is fun
“What is the Robert Frost title “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things” referring to?” It doesn’t know about the Shakesperian pun that’s featured and relates to the poem.
Robert Frost’s title, “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things,” suggests the importance of understanding and appreciating rural life and the natural world. The poem itself delves into themes of loss, resilience, and the cycle of life in the countryside, portraying how nature continues despite human grief or destruction.
In the poem, Frost reflects on the remnants of a burned-down farmhouse, observing the surrounding countryside with a sense of quiet acceptance. The title underscores the necessity of being attuned to these “country things” to grasp the deeper lessons they offer about life and endurance.
that one and “Old Man’s Winter Night” are two I cannot get through. For all of his great imagery, Frost’s more abstract poems do not reach me.
AI will not build killer robots to rid the world of Humans.
AI will enslave Humanity to further itself.
Do not fall for the lying campaign promises of John Quincy Adding Machine.
Time to start recruiting for the Butlerian Jihad, or too soon?
A bit late, if anything
Yep. ‘No thinking machines’ is good policy. We have a wealth of speculative fiction as well as the history of mankind to teach us that the ‘thinking machines’ mankind creates will be flawed like their creators but lack the humanity to be illogical for ‘good’…IOW thinking machines will be more likely to cull us to a people zoo population than to engage in the kinds illogical/hopeless self sacrifice that humans call heroic. No thinking machine gonna act as Cincinnatus did or ‘Horatius at the Bridge’.
I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.
Human bodies are mechanisms. But human beings are not merely bodies.
Human nature is fallen. But humans are redeemable.
That’s the mind/body duality, variously refuted in various ways.
The best refutation/caution is that the language used in talking about mental states and processes is language on holiday, far from where the words were tied to actual interests that created them. They express pictures of something not seen.
“Conscious” for instance might be legitimately used by a victim to a doctor, “I am conscious now.” It’s not a claim of a special ability unaccounted for by mechanisms, but to inform the medical personnel that you’ve recovered somewhat. The philosopher rips it from its legitimate place and uses it in a picture.
Repeated all over in popular philosophy. See Ryle, and late Wittgenstein:
309. What is your aim in philosophy? – To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.
Spoken as a true materialist.
For a vision of what must currently be happening, watch the “Person of Interest” series on Amazon Prime.
https://perplexity.ai is an extremely helpful AI tool for most things. However, it is only as good as the sources it uses. Since most sources for political information are leftist, it fails badly on most political questions. One can get it closer to the truth by asking Very Detailed Questions.
It’s dot com bubble trouble. I can remember working at Intel at the time and pin heads in marketing exclaiming all the processor power it will require to see your phone bill in 3D.
We are there again now.
Last night I wanted to check on Mother’s Day Date this year- so I typed it into Bing. Thankfully it did manage to give me the date, but then Bing felt compelled to also give me 20 lines of blathering retarded flim flam that it would be a good idea to start shopping for a gift 2-3 weeks before. Since it’s been incorporated into search engines, results are now worse. Also no one is forgetting the “woke” google AI.
Useless at best, more accurately described as evil.
So there’s your killer app. We’re approaching TRILLIONs in investment from all the tech giants and that’s all they have to show for it. Oh and black George Washington, and a dead Health Insurance CEO who was too stupid, greedy and crooked to see the eventual outcome of the adoption. Honestly I know I stand alone on the right with this, but I’m not feeling at all bad about that guy getting whacked- I deal with these crooks every day- and won’t feel bad if anyone ofts any of them- just remember- PLANES FELL OUT OF THE SKY AND PEOPLE DIED BECAUSE OF THIS TYPE OF GREED) – so no, I will probably be among those toasting, but that’s a different subject and I digress- except to say these are the people driving the cult of AI… stupid, greedy and crooked.
Smart businesses doing their homework and not run by morons ARE not adopting it. Consumers are doing everything they can to avoid and uninstall it. Its purpose is to serve as unwanted spyware and at best it’s useless and at worst it will be used against your own best interest.
Example: Somehow in the last few weeks, Grammarly got pushed onto MS Edge… yeah because I really want a 20 something gender confused PM in San Francisco scolding me on my tone. Evil.
I said earlier that AI will enslave Humans, and it will over time but not forever.
Our brain is faster than quantium computing and is self-regulating.
The left hated the notion of nuclear power generation until Google and Microsoft decided they needed NPP’s to power their left wing totalitarian information state.
The left literally transitioned from spittle-flecked invective to Julie Andrews dancing in a riotous meadow of edelweiss – all in less than a fortnight of the 21st century.
It’s a curious ending to sixty years of protest.
Not when you understand that the average leftist protestor is a mindless cultist bot.
Witness Code Pink: originally highly critical of civil rights abuses in China, members now cry “China Is Not Our Enemy’ after their cult leader/founder married a Maoist American businessman who provides significant funding to Code Pink from Chinese sources.
“Years ago, a Google search produced meaningful, useful, and fair results. Over the past decade or so, politically motivated algorithms have been developed to prioritize results that reveal a leftist, anti-Western, and anti-American ideology.”
When you ask Google for information on too many topics, you can actually FEEL its malevolent insistence in denying you the precise information it knows you want to find, but that it is determined you will never see.
I have routinely begun resorting to Yandex.ru to evade this censorship. Its results are barely curated, if that. There is a lot of noise, and frequent disinformation sources in the results, but my own intellectual curation rarely risks being less honest than Google’s.
That I must resort to the beneficence of our previous totalitarian enemy to defeat the oppression of our current totalitarian enemy is an embarrassing irony I have still not overcome.
“Не будь злым, товарищ.”
Agreed. I use Yandex for a lot of things – it’s a great resource for Tsarist era history, WWI and Bolshevik revolution related topics.
I also use the French search engine QWANT.
It is time for a disruptor on Search.
Much like Rumble- it will be difficult for it to be profitable and gain traction.
LLMs made the work of datarepublican possible. Think about that. The indexed da bases that DOGE uses were not feasible before AI.
Also, LLMs can read through massive text dumps like the JFK files, or omnibus laws, and find the interesting stuff and summarize it.
These abilities are not trivial. They are to human minds what backhoes are to human muscles. Amplifiers.
Side note: my autocomplete on my tablet knows about datarepublican.
Here’s my take on A.I. “reality”.
During WWII, military groups flooded south Pacific islands to build temporary bases with airports, hangars, radio shacks, and airplanes in furtherance of the war effort. Native popoulations benefited from the seemingly miracuolus techolologies the military brought with them. But when the war ended, military groups rapidly withdrew, leaving behind the native residents who desperately wanted the return of the miracles. So they tried to reproduce the military technology in stunningly accurate bamboo simulations: radio panels, huts, radar antennas, and even whole airplanes. These couldn’t function, of course, because the native’s lacked the knowledge of how the technologies truly worked: radio waves, bernouli’s priniciple of airfoil lift, internal combustion engines, etc. The simulation of modern technology became a kind of religion, which anthropoligists called “cargo cults”.
What AI proponents call “machine learning” today is just storing detected patterns in a searchable data structure. Nothing is “learning” because learning itself is an aspect of cognition that we don’t have the first clue about. We know learning involves memory, but where and how are memories stored? How are they accessed and retrieved? How are they categorizes and sorted.
Biological mysteries in humans, such as aphasia-induced loss of memory and speech that are later spontaneously recovered, imply that memories are not stored chemically in the brain, because in aphasia the brain structure originally associated with the memories or speech has been destroyed. In spontaneous aphasic recovery, lost learning “comes back” to apparently a different part of the brain. But what if in reality that learning and its associated memories weren’t stored in the brain at all in the first place?
Materialist scientists rule out the possibility of a non-material component to cognition. Thus they dismiss out-of-hand that memories and other learned abilities could reside outside the brain in a realm science hasn’t yet detected. That this dismissal is unwarrnated has precedent in the history of science. For example, before Guglielmo Marconi discovered radio in 1894, humans knew nothing of radio waves. Yet radio signals permeated the universe. Marconi’s first demonstrations of radio communications seemed like magic to materialist scientists, who resisted the idea that their world views were incomplete. There are many other examples: Michelson and Morley’s 1880s experiments disproving the “aether” belief; Newton’s mathematical description of gravity in 1687; Copernicus’ helio-centric model of the Solar system published in 1543.
Scientists are routinely wrong about the universe. So it’s just not a good idea to insist on current scientific knowledge being complete!
What if the brain is just an interface to the actual realm of cognition, a not-yet-scientifically-detected realm? That would mean that AI “scientists” are figuratively barking up the wrong tree.
Just as the cargo cultists were, with their crude bamboo simulacrums of airplanes and radio sets among post-WWII Pacific Islanders.
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