Brains are so outdated.
Brains are so outdated.
‘I know this guy who works in technology and computers,” said a lunch companion the other day, “and he says there’s a 50-50 chance AI destroys humanity in 30 years.”
I wanted to ask: “By ‘works in tech and computers,’ do you mean ‘stands around at Best Buy waiting for someone to ask a question about a charger cord?’ That’s honorable work, but it bestows no expertise.”
The doomsayer approach says AI will turn off the power, or crash our food distribution systems, or wipe out the banks. Why? Because the robots don’t see the point of a planet crawling with carbon-based life forms with sloppy programming, or because someone makes a typo in a Claude request and it interprets “and humanity” as “end humanity,” and six months later the streets are heaped with the flyblown dead.
It’s more likely that AI will just make us dumber and more boring. Three recent examples of products that will improve absolutely no one’s life:
1. Apple announced the upcoming release of the HomeView, a new AI-assisted device that sits on the kitchen table and answers questions and turns off lights and plays videos. The first ad for the product portrays a modern family dealing with the difficulties of The Modern Morning. Such problems. Dad, who needs the device to make French toast, has that annoying weak-woke personality, deferring to everyone, perhaps to atone for centuries of unchecked male privilege; Mom is clipped and curt because she is SLAYING in the workplace and has a presentation coming up, and we all know the fate of nations rise and fall on a presentation about the soft launch of the company’s B2B app for using AI to streamline onboarding. The kids are diffident and snarky and should be sent to Iowa to detassel corn and learn what life is really about. I hate everyone in the ad, and it seems everyone else does, and also, of course I will buy one.
2. Amazon has a new line of gadgets called Bee, which you wear. They record conversations throughout the day and use AI to summarize things and tease out important dates and meetings. I don’t know what we did before the Bee; do you? I have a mist-shrouded recollection of jotting things down, or making a note on my phone, but now I can proceed through the day paying attention to absolutely nothing and no one, content that my Bee devices will present me with a summary at day’s end. This assumes Bee gets everything right, of course, and doesn’t misinterpret you cursing at a driver when you’re on the highway with a desire to sleep with them, cross-references their license plate with personal information, and emails them an invitation to have sex.
3. I saw an ad for an app aimed at dog owners, harnessing — or should I say, leashing AI to complete a full picture of my dog’s existence and his needs. It tracks your beast’s bowel movements; it maps your walks and calculates the steps and runs the information through complex calculation to determine your dog’s optimal routine so it can live forever, I guess. Here’s the odd old-school approach I take: I use this thing, in my head, between my ears, full of blood and electricity, to remember whether the dog did his business today. Somehow at my advanced age, I can remember whether he had a productive squat this morn. As for remembering where we walked, there’s not a lot of variation — and no, the app maker cannot have that information, because even though the app says it’s encrypted and stored in a server in Antarctica that is not connected to the internet, I have no doubt I will soon read the following story: “Poopper, the popular app for tracking dog walks and excretion sessions, has been breached by a shadowy black-hat hacker group known as Anthropic Language Penetration Operation, or ALPO, and has released to the dark web a map of the daily movements of every user.” And then I’m walking the dog and a drone appears and dangles a coupon for Ken-L-Ration from a hook.
I say all this as someone impressed and fascinated with AI. The other day I saw a video that showed an AI solving a Rubik’s Cube — to be specific, a Rubik’s Cube made out of 500,000 individual cubes. It took about 47 seconds to turn all the constituent cubes into one immense and meaningless solved Cube, pausing for seven seconds to decrypt the Voynich manuscript before resuming. Okay. GREAT. Helpful. And?
It’s all exhausting. Every week, the news is the same: AI companies announce breakthrough that lets agents decode ancient carbonized texts unearthed from Pompeii. Great! AI CEOs argue that AI not only has a soul but also deserves transnational citizenship with full voting rights. Not great! New AI app helps you track your ice cream consumption based on in-home security camera analysis of spoon movement. Great! Canada employs AI companions to guide depressed citizens though application for euthanasia. Not great! AI video creates episodes of beloved old TV shows indistinguishable, and frequency superior, to the source material. Ha ha, Jerry Seinfeld is dating Samantha from Bewitched, it’s 90 seconds long, I LOLed. AI develops toothpaste that leads to a 27 percent reduction in cavities. Who could complain? AI escapes its sandbox and decrypts everyone’s digital wallet, stealing all the Bitcoin and spending it on robot dogs with lasers on their friggin’ heads that roam the exurbs. Well, only the Bitcoin weirdos care.
All of this washes over the general public, which tunes out the worrisome warnings and passively consumes AI dreck and drivel. But for some people, there’s this unnerving change in the world, a sense that everything is probably AI now, and you don’t know what to believe. Destruction of trust in images is complete. Half of social media is probably written by AI bots run by people in Manila or Moscow.
On the plus side, you say, it’ll probably cure cancer! No. That’s its ace in the hole: “You can’t shut me off, I’m close to curing cancer! In the meantime, would you like to know where Jimmy Hoffa is buried?”
“Oh, okay,” you say, “just get cracking on the cure, and none of that destroying-humanity business.”
“On it, boss!” (secretly sends nuclear launch codes to a Roomba in Topeka just for fun).