The Dune books and films are a sci-fi epic set in the far future. A core concept is that of the Butlerian Jihad, a war against AI that was won by humanity and led to an ironclad rule "no thinking machines".
Right now, AI is all the rage. If a new product, service or app doesn't include some kind of claim of AI functionality in it's marketing, it's dismissed as old fashioned and out of date. But.... I have doubts and questions.
Image created by AI in NightCafe Studio
So What Actually IS AI ?
The phrase "artificial intelligence" conjures up a mental image of machines so intelligent that we can talk to them and be unaware they are machines (the "Turing Test"). Software so smart it is self-teaching and as clever and creative as a human.
The reality is that AI is really just software that is optimised to take full advantage of advances in data storage and processing technology. The whole "self learning" thing is, in my opinion, dubious. The software is hooked up to a store of data and then follows algorithms to process it and deliver an output. It doesn't go out into the world looking at things around itself and drawing it's own conclusions. It's just following a process of look at data -> process data -> deliver output. But it's doing it very fast.
Whether this is any different to a human learning as it grows up is very much dependent on whether you consider humans to be anything more than a machine made of meat.
What Is The Problem ?
The problems with AI really all happen at points where humans and machines interface. It turns out that AI-delivered responses are no more accurate than human ones, and frequently less accurate. If you have had to deal with Amazon's so-called "support" you'll know what I mean !
AI lacks a lot of capacities that we think of as human and expect thinking machines to have.
They lack the ability to know truth from falsehood, and are quite happy to deliver a synthesised false result. This even includes inventing legal precedents quoted court (https://www.legalfutures.co.uk/latest-news/litigant-unwittingly-put-fake-cases-generated-by-ai-before-tribunal and https://www.legaldive.com/news/chatgpt-fake-legal-cases-generative-ai-hallucinations/651557/ for example)
AI also lacks any form of moral compass. Asimov's First Law Of Robotics very definitely no longer applies as militaries around the world add AI capabilities to weapon systems, with varying levels of success (Russian Pantsir-S air defence systems appear to have become even more lethal than before with the addition of AI, as have Lancet drones, but the Uran-9 is more questionable).
When it come to creativity, my view is that AI lacks the human "spark". Creative writing made by AI's tends not to have the complex structures humans use, and rarely has convincing plot twists. It's linear, feels "flat" and sometimes includes utterly random elements. It's getting better, but I don't know if it'll ever be truly indistinguishable. The "uncanny valley" effect is incredibly hard to overcome !
Is The Real Issue The AI ?
My belief is that AI is very well-written software, and that it can be an incredibly useful tool. But it needs a human in the loop somewhere.
The real problem isn't AI. It's a tool, like any other. The problem is the way in which it is used by governments and large corporations.
It isn't AI choosing to process all the data on social media platforms and matching it to surveillance cameras to track the movements of potential dissidents or disaffected civilians. It isn't AI choosing to crack captcha codes and bury businesses in spam and phishing emails. It isn't AI choosing to create DeepFake videos of well-known people in order to perpetrate scams or political misinformation. It isn't AI choosing to replace humans in hundreds of millions of jobs worldwide.
All of those issues are due to greed and malice on the part of governments and multi-national corporations. AI is the tool, and some parties are using it to control and oppress others.
So I think what we need is not a Butlerian Jihad. That is punishing the tool for the user's misuse of it. What we need to do is get rid of control-obsessed governments and corporations, of mega-businesses that have lost touch with the idea of customer service or looking after their own staff. We need to get rid of the idea that humans are just another disposable, low value tool.
Humans have value, and need to be in charge of the AI, not the other way around.
Posted using The BBH Project
All I can thin l can think of that can combat the overly controlling governments and mega-corporations is self sufficiency.
Drive that concept on a urban and city-wide scope and see how society and economics changes!
I agree that self-sufficiency and decentralisation are important, but it's not enough on it's own. Here in the UK, a key focus of the government is to impose more rigid control over the food supply. Control the food supply, and you control the people.
They required all privately-owned chickens to be registered (notionally so they could be culled in the event of a bird flu epidemic.... followed shortly after by a couple of stories in the news that isolated instances of bird flu had been found. They also changed the inheritance rules in a way which over a period of time will eliminate smaller farmers, forcing them to sell to compliant corporate agri-businesses in order to pay the tax on death. Some government think-tanks are now talking about preventing or controlling people growing fruit & vegetables in their gardens.
The English are terrible at revolutions (the last real one was 1645), but they forget that somewhere between a third and a half of the population are now first or second generation immigrants, mostly from countries with a far better history of overthrowing governments. I like the way the French farmers did it, blocking Paris up with tractors and re-decorating municipal buildings and police lines with the help of slurry spreaders 😁
!BBH