There’s been a bunch of chatter in the air recently about artificial intelligence and in particular its supposed novel existential threat to all human kind.   Sigh.   You’ll have to give us here at the humble offices of The Analog Underground a moment to collect ourselves and summon the courage to wade back into this on-going conversation of technology, society and an all too real stupidity that seems to hover around that combination.  

O.k. We’re ready now, centered.  As with most things existential, it helps to go back to the basics which for us are based in the Digital/Analog divide.  To paraphrase The Analog Underground Manifesto from 2006, Digital at its very core, is only a representation of something else.  That something else is the continuous spaghetti of a compound sine wave that is un-intermediated experience flowing, unbroken and undivided, from one slice of attention to the next. That something else is Analog. Yes, that flood can be overwhelming. That sets us up to accept the trimming back of reality to a more manageable picture that is required by our Digital limitations even when, inevitably, that trimmed picture is not entirely accurate. 

There are many wonderful things empowered by Digital.  Yes.  There are.  However, as we continue down this Digital path it becomes obvious that there are costs, drawbacks, and horrible, un-anticipated consequences (We’re looking at you “Social” media).  We’ve been on this journey long enough that we shouldn’t be surprised that AI  has all the upsides and all the downsides typical of the Digital landscape from which it springs. 

That surprise is the first reason the problem with AI is us, not AI.  We are one gullible lot of sentience. From our first creation myths all the way down to the most recent second dithering from reality into memory, we rush to stories of salvation by greater powers.  It’s woven in our religion, our politics, and our most intimate attachments. We seem primed to yearn for something outside ourselves that will make sense of this crazy Analog deluge of experience.   Don’t get us wrong, we’re not saying that such powers don’t exist, but nothing in our history, factual or emotional, gives any indication that we can understand those powers well enough to act productively and sustainably on them.   What could possibly go wrong then with us trying to create an artificial variant on those kind of powers?

 And that brings us to the second reason the problem with AI is us, not AI.  In a weird twist, we couple our extreme gullibility with an infinite over-estimation of our own abilities to manage and manipulate the world around us, which inflates several orders of magnitude when it comes to the Digital world.  Yes, it’s, uh, interesting to contemplate orders of magnitude beyond infinity but here we are.   We rush ahead, enraptured by our own visions of the good things AI might bring, unaware and uninterested in even the most obvious of costs and drawbacks. 

So what’s a good Digeratti to do?  The AI Genie is not going to be stuffed back in the bottle anymore than any number of our more questionable creations like nuclear weapons, the aforementioned “social” media, and circus peanuts.   If we’re to avoid most extreme negative consequences of AI we have to start at those two sources of the AI problem, both of which are in us, not the technology. 

Only time will tell whether we’ll summon the collective courage to look reality in the eye, or more importantly look ourselves in the eye and acknowledge our own limitations.  Will we summon the courage to be kind to ourselves and others, to nurture the good and ameliorate the bad?  It is only in that honest accounting that we can form the basis for assessing, correcting, even nurturing artificial intelligences to the benefit of humanity and the world we share with so much other being.  

   Why is the problem with AI us and not the technology?