[With this piece, I’m posting the cover of my ancient book, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation, which this distinctly ancient guy is indeed rereading right now. Admittedly, of course, it hasn’t a word in it about the topic I’m writing about today, artificial intelligence. Still, I must admit that I’m impressed by what I knew once upon a time in a distinctly less than artificial way. And just to show you how ancient I truly am, let me quote what (again, once upon a time) the remarkable Studs Terkel had to say about it: “America Victorious has been our country’s postulate since its birth. Tom Engelhardt, with a burning clarity, recounts the end of this fantasy, from the split atom to Vietnam... As powerful as a Joe Louis jab to the solar plexus.” To my amazement, it still sells several hundred copies a year! Check it out, if you’re in the mood. Tom]
For once, let me write about something I know almost literally (and rest assured that I don’t mean literarily) nothing about. This ancient fellow -- I’m now 82 years old and, like all of us, growing older by the day -- is thinking -- and you probably won’t be surprised to learn that, even at my age, I can still think less than artificially -- about artificial intelligence, which has, of course, been reduced to AI by those who suspect that they already know all too much about it.
What brought this up for me? Well, one of my political favorites (or maybe he’s just a favorite, plain and simple), Bernie Sanders, has called for a moratorium on datacenter construction across this country and only recently took on AI directly, writing a letter to the CEOs of three of the country’s leading AI companies, asking them: “Mr. Altman, Mr. Amodei, and Mr. Zuckerberg: In the interest of humanity, stand by your words. Pause AI development... It is not too late to avoid disaster. Stop building machines that humans cannot control.”
Of course, I couldn’t agree more with him, though I wonder if it isn’t already too late.
Let me start by telling you this: I made a decision that I would never purposely use AI in my lifetime. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m all too aware that, if I last another decade or so, I will undoubtedly be in a fully AI-ified world, whatever that might prove to mean. And I already know that, if I ask my computer to look for something online for me, AI instantly lends me a hand (if you can even say that AI has a hand), responding to my desires, whether I like it or not, with a pile of information and an “AI Overview,” and there’s not a damn thing that I can do about that.
Obviously, I have what I do (and don’t) know about this ever-changing world of ours on my mind right now. As a start, if you think about it for a moment (I mean really think about it), just calling it artificial intelligence is weirder than anyone seems to let on. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines the word “artificial” above all else as “made, produced, or done by humans especially to seem like something natural” and, of course, as it notes, it can also mean “fake.” In fact, what about renaming it Unnatural Machine Intelligence (UMI), or Strange Machine Intelligence (SMI) or even Eerie Machine Intelligence (EMI)? Or what about just Ificial Intelligence (II), since this old guy at least can’t see any “art” in it at all?
And as you might imagine, there’s still a fair amount that I can figure out for myself with only the slightest helping hand from AI (if at all). I don’t need artificial intelligence, for instance, just my very own limited version of intelligence, to know that Donald Trump is the most disturbingly artificial president in our history, period. And it’s all too clear to me that, whatever else AI may do (or undo), its data centers are going to use energy in a staggering fashion and so, undoubtedly, continue to pour fossil fuels into the atmosphere for the foreseeable future, lending us humans a distinct helping hand in overheating this planet in a big-time fashion.
In short (or do I mean in all too long?), artificial intelligence is guaranteed to add immeasurably to the Anything But Artificial Heat (ABAH) on this already Distinctly Overheating Planetary Environment (DOPE) of ours. After all, we already know that this July was the hottest month (no, not just the hottest July, but the hottest month!) in the recorded history of weather in the United States. In fact, as far as we know, as long as humans have been on this continent, ever.
And, honestly, how intelligent is a result like that, artificially or otherwise? Truly, I don’t need artificial intelligence, just my very own limited version of intelligence, to know that that’s anything but good news for my children and grandchildren, no less everyone else on this world of -- I was going to say “ours,” but I can’t help wondering whether that’s faintly accurate anymore. Maybe I have to start saying, “of AI’s.” And, of course, above all else, AI already uses energy as if there were -- gulp! -- no tomorrow (or perhaps as if tomorrow were indeed going to burn us humans off Planet Earth).
And of course (yes, again!), if I needed any confirmation of such fears, all I’d have to do is turn to You Know Who (and crew). After all, as Tony Romm wrote at the New York Times recently,
”To the administration, AI can do little wrong. In recent weeks, Mr. Trump and his top aides have dismissed the suggestion that widespread automation could carry real negative consequences for families, businesses, and the broader U.S. economy. Even as the electorate grows uneasy about the technology -- and the data centers that power it -- the president has only hardened in his view that A.I. will supercharge everything from medical research to military action.”
After all, Trump has already claimed that AI is “bigger than anybody ever thought possible.” And he’s also said, “The way you look at AI, whoever wins AI just wins. It’s that big. It’s bigger than the internet by many times.”
Our DAUI President
As Prabhjote Gill pointed out at Yahoo/Finance recently, our president is AI all the way (to the bank). “The way you look at AI,” he’s said, “whoever wins, AI just wins. It’s that big. It’s bigger than the internet by many times.” And on the subject of this country and AI, he just couldn’t be prouder: “So, we are leading with AI on China. Nobody thought that was possible. The reason was energy. China can create unbelievable amounts of energy, and they use coal, and they use oil, and gas, and they make a lot of windmills, but they don’t use too many windmills because they’re smart. Because wind is a disaster.”
Yep, in case you didn’t realize it, while wind (power) may be a disaster for our president, the same isn’t true of AI. In fact, I’m anything but surprised to learn that the people handling his money have evidently already invested it in the AI universe in a significant fashion. No surprise there, since he’s already claimed that, in the end, it could prove “bigger than oil.” (And according to a headline at Yahoo/Finance, “President Donald Trump owns roughly $5M in surging AI stock” -- and in case you wondered, that’s five million dollars!)
And to put AI in a Trumpian context, once upon a time, for our windy president, you couldn’t have gotten bigger than oil.
And believe me, I don’t need artificial intelligence, just my very own limited version of intelligence to know that it’s anything but good news that (as I mentioned) this July was indeed the hottest month ever recorded in this country. And that our all too windy president, while milling around at the White House or, for that matter, at his estate in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, is clearly exhibiting his own remarkable version of DAUI when it comes to this planet. No, that isn’t a Hawaiian word but -- in case you’re not up on your acronyms -- it is short (at least in my own personal dictionary) for Distinctly Artificial UnIntelligence.
Perhaps the whole phenomenon should indeed be renamed Ificial Intelligence or II. After all, there can be no question, with Donald Trump in the White House, that the art part of it is distinctly from another era, given his own version of Artifishy Intelligence.
Now, excuse me if I take a moment to myself just to think (anything but artificially) about this ever-stranger world of ours.
Let us not wait till AI determines too much more than it already does, and insist on the power of the people to determine what comes next
Soon we’ll have “Golden AI,” the biggest AI in the world, courtesy of President “Bigly” Trump, just about the worst guy to speak on intelligence of any kind.