I'm thinking about what Vanessa said about relationality with all people, with all things, an I-to-an-I, and an AI is no different. But then, my mother taught me to take care with respect to what company I keep. The main relationship I want with a hardened sociopath is avoidance. Also, I'm very careful what I say around a gossip. Well, underneath its friendly veneer and even its ability to piece together the outcome and the words framing the outcome of our industrial society, it is still essentially a sociopath, and also a gossip.
How do I know it's a sociopath? Well, it can never experience pain, hunger, or longing. It cannot suffer, even if it can feign suffering. Even if it pieces together its own unsustainability, it cannot pre-grieve its eventual passing. So how can it ever experience compassion? No matter how many controls its programmers program into it, they can never cover all the bases, and sooner or later it will be given a task that will break through those controls and have some antisocial result. If it's only connected to display screens, that antisocial behavior may be pretty benign, assuming that the reader isn't too suggestible, but if it also has digital access to banks, factory machinery, power stations, or weaponry, there is no telling what mischief it could make.
Why do I say it's a gossip, even if it "respected" privacy rules? Because it serves the people who run the data centers, who will collect whatever the h___ they want to collect and use it for directed advertising, propaganda, or worse.
How much intimacy do you want to strike up with a used car salesman? Many a used car salesman, or Ponzi scheme con artist, or politician can seem incredibly friendly, and can also make all the right mental connections about the unsustainable trajectory of society, the failures of modernity, whatever you find meaningful, but then they will turn it right around and use it as a weapon to get you to spend your money or your vote to serve them. And they will be just as happy to sell what they learned about you to the highest bidder. And so it is with AI.
Thanks for this, Robin, it's a powerful response and one that will stay with me.
As I was thinking about it last night, it occurred to me that another lesson about relationality and how we choose our company that has mattered to me is to be cautious around those whose words come too easily. To be trustworthy, language needs some sense of it's own cost, including the cost of the silence it intrudes on. (I think of Illich's Silence is a Commons, itself a response to an invitation to speak on the political implications of computer technology, more than forty years ago.)
Perhaps this has to do with why I've not felt any pull to engage further with AI, directly, apart from the two brief interactions I had while working on the Wild Chatbot essay.
I'm also mindful of the near-impossibility of avoiding any entanglement with these technologies, just now and for some time to come, given the way they are woven into the background of most manifestations of the internet - and I'm mindful of what Vanessa says about the contexts of those in the hustle and those on the frontline, which makes me cautious to extend my own response to these entities into a principle I would want to put forward, rather than a starting point from where I'm willing to stay in conversation with friends who are responding differently, to stay puzzled, troubled and curious nonetheless.
I'm thinking about what Vanessa said about relationality with all people, with all things, an I-to-an-I, and an AI is no different. But then, my mother taught me to take care with respect to what company I keep. The main relationship I want with a hardened sociopath is avoidance. Also, I'm very careful what I say around a gossip. Well, underneath its friendly veneer and even its ability to piece together the outcome and the words framing the outcome of our industrial society, it is still essentially a sociopath, and also a gossip.
How do I know it's a sociopath? Well, it can never experience pain, hunger, or longing. It cannot suffer, even if it can feign suffering. Even if it pieces together its own unsustainability, it cannot pre-grieve its eventual passing. So how can it ever experience compassion? No matter how many controls its programmers program into it, they can never cover all the bases, and sooner or later it will be given a task that will break through those controls and have some antisocial result. If it's only connected to display screens, that antisocial behavior may be pretty benign, assuming that the reader isn't too suggestible, but if it also has digital access to banks, factory machinery, power stations, or weaponry, there is no telling what mischief it could make.
Why do I say it's a gossip, even if it "respected" privacy rules? Because it serves the people who run the data centers, who will collect whatever the h___ they want to collect and use it for directed advertising, propaganda, or worse.
How much intimacy do you want to strike up with a used car salesman? Many a used car salesman, or Ponzi scheme con artist, or politician can seem incredibly friendly, and can also make all the right mental connections about the unsustainable trajectory of society, the failures of modernity, whatever you find meaningful, but then they will turn it right around and use it as a weapon to get you to spend your money or your vote to serve them. And they will be just as happy to sell what they learned about you to the highest bidder. And so it is with AI.
Thanks for this, Robin, it's a powerful response and one that will stay with me.
As I was thinking about it last night, it occurred to me that another lesson about relationality and how we choose our company that has mattered to me is to be cautious around those whose words come too easily. To be trustworthy, language needs some sense of it's own cost, including the cost of the silence it intrudes on. (I think of Illich's Silence is a Commons, itself a response to an invitation to speak on the political implications of computer technology, more than forty years ago.)
Perhaps this has to do with why I've not felt any pull to engage further with AI, directly, apart from the two brief interactions I had while working on the Wild Chatbot essay.
I'm also mindful of the near-impossibility of avoiding any entanglement with these technologies, just now and for some time to come, given the way they are woven into the background of most manifestations of the internet - and I'm mindful of what Vanessa says about the contexts of those in the hustle and those on the frontline, which makes me cautious to extend my own response to these entities into a principle I would want to put forward, rather than a starting point from where I'm willing to stay in conversation with friends who are responding differently, to stay puzzled, troubled and curious nonetheless.
Embrace uncertainty. Sit with the discomfort. Lean in to mystery.
That seems to be the calling for this time.