Friends, one of the most troubling and exciting fields these days is A.I. -- artificial intelligence. Its capabilities are, quite simply, growing by leaps and bounds. The best supercomputers can now complete complex creative tasks that previously only high-qualified geniuses (like me) could manage. Yikes!!! It is frankly foreseeable that supercomputers will soon be preferred over professors by many college students. Supercomputers are continuously updating and expanding their knowledge and skill sets. Unlike stick-in-the-mud professors, who only know how to teach in one style, supercomputers can modulate the form of knowledge delivery based on the preferences and attributes of the pupil. Best of all, while one supercomputer teaches you English Lit, another supercomputer can write your term paper for you -- and it can probably make that paper more transcendently beautiful than a Shakespearean sonnet, or, if you prefer, exactly like a Shakespearean sonnet. Neat-o! Will the need for the human intellect evaporate altogether? That seems unlikely. What does seem likely, however, is that, just as much unskilled work has already been rendered obsolete by mechanization, in the future much skilled work, even highly specialized work, will get the same treatment, courtesy of A.I. Fewer and fewer actual humans will be required to produce not only goods but also great works of literature, artistic masterpieces, and even stirring editorials and presidential addresses. The bottom line is that we are likely to enjoy more leisure and prosperity than ever before -- and, thanks to our friendly neighborhood supercomputer, we will be able to use that leisure and prosperity to create for ourselves not just islands of material abundance, but also virtual and actual oases of aesthetic and intellectual brilliance. Want, for instance, to spend your afternoon chatting with Einstein about relativity, or St. Augustine about sin? A.I. has you covered -- and might frankly do a better job of it than Einstein or St. Augustine ever could (especially in their present states of decomposition)... It truly is a brave new world!!!
(My advice: if you're worried about robots and supercomputers putting you out of a job, get rich and quit your job preemptively! Whatever technological changes bedevil us, I guarantee you that the owners of capital will do just fine, thank you very much!)
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/19/tech/chatgpt-future-davos
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/how-chatgpt-will-destabilize-white-collar-work/ar-AA16yBZM
In other news, here's an excellent article by a pal-o'-mine about the ethical questions raised by Sleepy Joe's document controversy. Did Biden mishandle secret materials? Duh. What may be more interesting is the corrupt world in which he, his family, and his associates moved in the years before he became president. The more we learn about Biden, Inc., the more revolting it sounds.
Dr.Waddy from Jack: AI: my generation may be the last (maybe) to have experienced the wonder we derive from considering the technological breakthroughs we've seen since the '50s. Take space exploration; all we had was science fiction which, for example,depicted moon rockets as winged creations going directly to the lunar surface; no Lems or Command Modules. I hope AI will provide for us a virtual experience of space travel.Why, my 1959 self would have swallowed his gum!
ReplyDeleteJack, that part of A.I., and V.R., will be fun, to be sure: increasingly we'll have the option of living in an alternate reality even more compelling than the one projected by CNN!!! Some sci fi authors have even speculated that, upon our physical death, our digital consciousness will be able to exist indefinitely in artificial worlds of our own choosing. Heaven 2.0?
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