Let me start by saying something that people who know me well know about me. I like technology.
I bought my first computer in 1989. It was, at the time, hot stuff. I had a 20-megabyte hard drive and 640K RAM and a CGA color monitor and ran on DOS 3.0. It had the new, at the time 3 ½ inch floppy disks. It, along with the printer, cost me $3,000 which was a sizeable chunk of change in 1989.
I’ve had cell phones pretty much from the start and portable digital assistants to keep a calendar. When the internet came into existence, I was on it. I own two laptops, an up-to-date iPhone, an iPad, a Kindle and an Apple Watch. I have multiple email accounts, two professional and one personal. I have not used a paper calendar in decades, and I find writing a check to be a personal defeat.
I play only one video game, John Madden football. My first version of the game was on that old computer, and it was a bunch of little circles running around. The current versions have live commentary and the graphics are incredible. Again, I really like technology.
The new wave of technology is artificial intelligence, AI. AI is incredible and when we use the word “incredible” it can be used in opposing ways. I can say my dining experience at a restaurant was incredible because the food and service was so good. Or, I can have a really awful experience and say it was incredible that a place could be so bad. AI is incredible because two things can be true at the same time. AI can be incredible because it can do so many good things; it can be incredible because it has the capacity to do awful things.
It is said that AI can produce things in medical technology that we cannot do on our own. Computers can sort through information at speeds the human mind cannot do. AI has access to massive amounts of information and sort through the information at incredible speed. My septuagenarian brain moves a lot slower than it used to. My wife and I watch Jeopardy every night and I’d be much better at it if I had 10 minutes to answer a lot of the questions. I’ve noticed that most of the people who win the game are young. That said, a computer comes up with the answers at speeds the human mind cannot.
There are problems with AI. It can come up with the wrong answers and when it gets the answers wrong it doesn’t have the fallback ability to realize it’s wrong. I tend to be snarky and so I decided to ask AI a snarky question. I asked it what would have happened in western philosophical thought if Socrates had chosen suicide rather than living. It gave me a rather elaborate answer. The problem was the great philosopher had been condemned to death and was given the choice to either be stoned to death or take his own life by drinking hemlock. Socrates drank the hemlock and took his own life. I asked AI a deceptive question and it gave me an off-the-wall answer.
Perhaps the biggest problem with AI is what makes it dangerous. AI has no heart. By heart I don’t mean the organ that pumps blood, but we consider it is from our heart when we make decisions based on emotion or empathy. AI lacks the ability to be empathetic. Instead of a beating heart, inside AI are a lot of cold, calculating chips that have the capacity to make awful decisions.
All of this means that we are left to the moral core of the people running this. I find this to be scary. The concept of a moral core is not something many find to be important. The reality is that character doesn’t really matter to our society. We choose people for leadership positions based on what we believe they can do for us rather than their moral character. Many, perhaps most of the people running AI are motivated by power and profit and, like the machines they have created, have little or no heart.
What makes natural intelligence so amazing is that while we can’t come up with information at lightning speed, we can also weigh our choices in terms of what is good or bad. A computer running AI can choose to annihilate a city because it’s logical to do so. Natural intelligence would tell us not to kill innocent people.
AI, in short, has no character. Healthy and good human beings have character and, perhaps, it would be wise of us to remember that character, empathy and heart, do matter.
John E. Manzo is a retired United Church of Christ pastor and adjunct professor at Ivy Tech Community College and can be reached at jemanzo324@gmail.com.