The Cult of Artificial Intelligence
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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