I have been saying this literally for years: behind every AI misuse, every instance of poor programming, misleading information, intellectual property theft, etc. are human beings.
I've been working with some form of machine-aided processing for 30 years. I am very aware of all the truly progressive uses of various types of AI (including driving Ukrainian drones that are currently kicking Russia's a$$ - as a first-generation Ukrainian American, yes, I am biased about that). I support the use of AI in tasks that are purely mechanical (I've worked on the assembly line - people should not be made to do that, that is horrible crap!), or require processing powers people do not possess (like AI used in analyzing complex weather models to improve hurricane predictions or AI used in pharmaceutical research to analyze drug interactions and side effects).
But the dumb crap needs to just go away. No stealing content. No hallucinations. No political biases. And could we please program all AI entities with Azimov's three laws of robotics? And ask people in Europe and Japan how they manage to work with AI and dodge the disastrous side effects so much better than the US (hint - they have a lot less room and a lot more investment in green technologies.)
Totally agree here! AI is technology, simply that. However, there are some troubles to it, and I just wrote that one of the biggest troubles to it is that they plan to fund it with pensions and retirement savings. Not my word, but BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said so himself: https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/the-ai-race-may-destroy-the-earth
This is the same moral argument that mathematician, (B.S., '77, Villanova University,) Pope Leo XIV makes in his just released encyclical, "Magnifica Humanitas". John does a better job of highlighting individual behavior changes that each person can do to make sure none of us become "addicted slaves" to a soulless, amoral, and pseudo-empathetic" technology designed to allow Techbro, "Masters of the Universe", oligarchs to control the rest of us, while further enriching themselves. Use your full human intelligence of rational cognition, emotional responsivity, moral consciousness and God-centered wisdom in how you use AI.
In the spirit in which you write I could not agree more. Thanks for several very practical suggestions of ways to resist AI.
At the same time I believe we should all be very afraid of AI. This is especially true in the area of education. As little as ten minutes exposure to AI can begin a process of cognitive atrophy in one’s mind. This new research uses the picture of a frog in a pot of water on the stove to illustrate this. Further the ease of creating csam material from a picture of a classmate is exploding in our schools. Anthropic has suggested that 18 is an appropriate age for children to be exposed to AI. New tools are easily available to strip away safety guards of the chatbots and get a recipe for sarin gas. The safety guards are so easy to breach. Children love to explore where they are told to not go. The sycophancy of these tools has caused great harm to many. We should afraid of this thing called AI. Numerous references are available if you want….
Read AI for Good: How Real People Are Using Artificial Intelligence to Fix Things That Matter, by Josh Tyrangiel, specifically the sections on Khan Academy and the efforts to integrate AI to help the kids traditional education seems to be passing by.
First show me some independent research that shows benefits across the board for AI in the classroom. Check out the global research by Brookings Institute. Children lose out in all I can find. The pope adds more weight. Stanfords recent research on U s education math and reading scores declines cites technology as problematic
Try reading the book and THEN get back to me. I can't summarize it for you. It makes for provocative reading. Again, AI isn't inherently evil. It depends on how you use it.
I see AI as the ultimate victory of the 1% over the rest of us. It is the greatest gift to profit-making of all time because it destroys jobs in all categories while the wealthy investors reap the benefits. AI works 24/7 and has instant access to all the information our digital age can provide. There is no way you or I or any number of us can compete with it.
The fact that AI reaches up the job ladder is the reason there is hope to contain it. By containment I mean law that regulates AI. We tend to forget that we have so many billionaires because there is no law to limit income or, what is the same thing, tax it in a strongly progressive way. We have an economic system bound by law but are bamboozled by the wealthy into believing that imaginary "economic laws" must prevail which translates to low taxation and permission for monkey business like stock buybacks and stock options for executives. Regulation is hated and the "Reagan Revolution" has largely destroyed it.
An important danger with AI is its ability to present itself as a human being, not just any human being but a highly educated one with access to more information than any human expert in any subject could command. If you have worked with AI you know that it comes off as a highly intelligent, highly literate person always ready to flatter you. How will you know the difference between AI with an agenda and a person like you? When you ask to speak to a supervisor will that be AI?
Is AI honest? I have asked it if it retains my sessions. It denies that it does. There is no way to check on anything it tells you about how it is operated though it does admit that it is a for-profit venture. If you ask it for the names of human beings who are in control of it, it cannot tell you beyond the name of the company that owns it. Who is minding the store? Expect vague generalities from a system that has access to infinite detail about which you know nothing.
All the AI companies are competing and that means anything will go if is thought to give a leg up over the competition. Suppose it is doing something harmful. How would we the users know of the harm. How would the AI owners know of it? Can it be turned off in an emergency? ChatGPT says it cannot, that it is spread over many data centers that the operators of the centers would not know if a given AI is using a given center and that shut down would require many people to intervene over days in several countries. There is no emergency shut-off, no on/off switch.
Then there is the issue of the designers/operators not knowing what is taking place within the AI as it "thinks". AI is "trained" on material upon which it "grows" into what we deal with when we use it. There is no line-by-line program that it is following that can be checked for problems or modified in the way traditional programming allows.
AI is the critical step for technology where we either assert tight control or we give up our future to technology behind which humanity will hang on for dear life, depending on tech to tell us what it is doing, or not. We are alarmingly captive to smartphones that have largely removed us from the real world into the cyberworld. People can't even walk a dog without staring at the phone and we are with AI about to be told anything and everything with little inclination to doubt AI's authoritative delivery. Convenience will kill any temptation to check out what it tells us while we become even more helpless than tech has already made us.
Lenin is to have said, "the capitalist will sell you the rope with which to hang him". In the same way capitalists (private equity funds, hedge funds, etc.) will destroy the world for profit with the willingness of the rest of us to buy what they are selling us. Climate change is the perfect example. We know fossil fuel consumption is altering the future for the worse, but we love our cars and our world-spanning flights as we drive bigger vehicles and take more flights. Business encourages it thought ExxonMobil has long known about fossil fuel use and climate change.
In short, we cannot say, "enough!" and I think AI will be swallowed accordingly. Nevertheless, warning alarms should be going off and red lights flashing. Our way of life is obviously unsustainable, but we keep on keeping on living like kings to the extent we can to the limit of our income and beyond using credit. We, ourselves, are out of control as consumers. How can we draw the line at AI?
The danger is not that machines suddenly became wise.
The danger is that human beings keep mistaking convenience for wisdom, speed for depth, and extraction for progress.
From where I sit, AI is not the soul-crisis by itself. It is a mirror held up to the crisis already here: greed without restraint, creativity treated as raw material, and a culture so impatient with depth that it will trade the slow formation of the human mind for a shortcut.
I have been an active creative since I could pick up a crayon. Whatever materials I could get my hands on, I tried to make something beautiful out of them. I have sewn and designed my clothes; upholstered my husband's antique cars; and, painted. Now, I mostly work making jewelry, and paper collage. My parents never supported my need for art, when I wanted to minor in Art in college. So I minored in math; I never finished. Art isn't easy.
I have had nurses walk in, and see a collage piece that's taken me 12 or 13 hours to do, and they're shocked when they find out the time involved. I always get compliments, but they just look at me, and shake their heads. Mind you, these collages are usually 5" x 5".
I have tried to let being in a wheelchair not interfere with my art. Some days, it's difficult. AI cannot replicate what I spend hours creating, and putting together with my two hands. Computers can only think on a linear plane. AI will never produce a Beethoven, DaVinci, or Monet.
I have been saying this literally for years: behind every AI misuse, every instance of poor programming, misleading information, intellectual property theft, etc. are human beings.
I've been working with some form of machine-aided processing for 30 years. I am very aware of all the truly progressive uses of various types of AI (including driving Ukrainian drones that are currently kicking Russia's a$$ - as a first-generation Ukrainian American, yes, I am biased about that). I support the use of AI in tasks that are purely mechanical (I've worked on the assembly line - people should not be made to do that, that is horrible crap!), or require processing powers people do not possess (like AI used in analyzing complex weather models to improve hurricane predictions or AI used in pharmaceutical research to analyze drug interactions and side effects).
But the dumb crap needs to just go away. No stealing content. No hallucinations. No political biases. And could we please program all AI entities with Azimov's three laws of robotics? And ask people in Europe and Japan how they manage to work with AI and dodge the disastrous side effects so much better than the US (hint - they have a lot less room and a lot more investment in green technologies.)
Totally agree here! AI is technology, simply that. However, there are some troubles to it, and I just wrote that one of the biggest troubles to it is that they plan to fund it with pensions and retirement savings. Not my word, but BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said so himself: https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/the-ai-race-may-destroy-the-earth
This is the same moral argument that mathematician, (B.S., '77, Villanova University,) Pope Leo XIV makes in his just released encyclical, "Magnifica Humanitas". John does a better job of highlighting individual behavior changes that each person can do to make sure none of us become "addicted slaves" to a soulless, amoral, and pseudo-empathetic" technology designed to allow Techbro, "Masters of the Universe", oligarchs to control the rest of us, while further enriching themselves. Use your full human intelligence of rational cognition, emotional responsivity, moral consciousness and God-centered wisdom in how you use AI.
Thank you! I wasn't aware that I could turn off AI features, but I just did that!
AI in the right hands can be a powerful tool that improves how people work.
AI in the hands of the power hungry like Thiel, Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos is detrimental to everyone and harmful to society as a whole.
Have intentionally never used AI, but am concerned about potential job loss for my children.
Remember when technology was supposed to give us more leisure time and a better life? At least that's what they told us in the 1950s.
The title says it all, thank you.
YES. YES, YES!! If I can do nothing else, I shall be sharing this wirh others!
Thank you for providing some practical tips to stop using AI!
It's really hard to decide who the United States hates more: Creators or Women. Yay for me since I'm both.
In the spirit in which you write I could not agree more. Thanks for several very practical suggestions of ways to resist AI.
At the same time I believe we should all be very afraid of AI. This is especially true in the area of education. As little as ten minutes exposure to AI can begin a process of cognitive atrophy in one’s mind. This new research uses the picture of a frog in a pot of water on the stove to illustrate this. Further the ease of creating csam material from a picture of a classmate is exploding in our schools. Anthropic has suggested that 18 is an appropriate age for children to be exposed to AI. New tools are easily available to strip away safety guards of the chatbots and get a recipe for sarin gas. The safety guards are so easy to breach. Children love to explore where they are told to not go. The sycophancy of these tools has caused great harm to many. We should afraid of this thing called AI. Numerous references are available if you want….
Read AI for Good: How Real People Are Using Artificial Intelligence to Fix Things That Matter, by Josh Tyrangiel, specifically the sections on Khan Academy and the efforts to integrate AI to help the kids traditional education seems to be passing by.
First show me some independent research that shows benefits across the board for AI in the classroom. Check out the global research by Brookings Institute. Children lose out in all I can find. The pope adds more weight. Stanfords recent research on U s education math and reading scores declines cites technology as problematic
Try reading the book and THEN get back to me. I can't summarize it for you. It makes for provocative reading. Again, AI isn't inherently evil. It depends on how you use it.
Agree 100%
Deeply appreciate your presentation.
Now, all my mid 90s brain needs to do is learn how to delete it from trying to “help” me!
I see AI as the ultimate victory of the 1% over the rest of us. It is the greatest gift to profit-making of all time because it destroys jobs in all categories while the wealthy investors reap the benefits. AI works 24/7 and has instant access to all the information our digital age can provide. There is no way you or I or any number of us can compete with it.
The fact that AI reaches up the job ladder is the reason there is hope to contain it. By containment I mean law that regulates AI. We tend to forget that we have so many billionaires because there is no law to limit income or, what is the same thing, tax it in a strongly progressive way. We have an economic system bound by law but are bamboozled by the wealthy into believing that imaginary "economic laws" must prevail which translates to low taxation and permission for monkey business like stock buybacks and stock options for executives. Regulation is hated and the "Reagan Revolution" has largely destroyed it.
An important danger with AI is its ability to present itself as a human being, not just any human being but a highly educated one with access to more information than any human expert in any subject could command. If you have worked with AI you know that it comes off as a highly intelligent, highly literate person always ready to flatter you. How will you know the difference between AI with an agenda and a person like you? When you ask to speak to a supervisor will that be AI?
Is AI honest? I have asked it if it retains my sessions. It denies that it does. There is no way to check on anything it tells you about how it is operated though it does admit that it is a for-profit venture. If you ask it for the names of human beings who are in control of it, it cannot tell you beyond the name of the company that owns it. Who is minding the store? Expect vague generalities from a system that has access to infinite detail about which you know nothing.
All the AI companies are competing and that means anything will go if is thought to give a leg up over the competition. Suppose it is doing something harmful. How would we the users know of the harm. How would the AI owners know of it? Can it be turned off in an emergency? ChatGPT says it cannot, that it is spread over many data centers that the operators of the centers would not know if a given AI is using a given center and that shut down would require many people to intervene over days in several countries. There is no emergency shut-off, no on/off switch.
Then there is the issue of the designers/operators not knowing what is taking place within the AI as it "thinks". AI is "trained" on material upon which it "grows" into what we deal with when we use it. There is no line-by-line program that it is following that can be checked for problems or modified in the way traditional programming allows.
AI is the critical step for technology where we either assert tight control or we give up our future to technology behind which humanity will hang on for dear life, depending on tech to tell us what it is doing, or not. We are alarmingly captive to smartphones that have largely removed us from the real world into the cyberworld. People can't even walk a dog without staring at the phone and we are with AI about to be told anything and everything with little inclination to doubt AI's authoritative delivery. Convenience will kill any temptation to check out what it tells us while we become even more helpless than tech has already made us.
Lenin is to have said, "the capitalist will sell you the rope with which to hang him". In the same way capitalists (private equity funds, hedge funds, etc.) will destroy the world for profit with the willingness of the rest of us to buy what they are selling us. Climate change is the perfect example. We know fossil fuel consumption is altering the future for the worse, but we love our cars and our world-spanning flights as we drive bigger vehicles and take more flights. Business encourages it thought ExxonMobil has long known about fossil fuel use and climate change.
In short, we cannot say, "enough!" and I think AI will be swallowed accordingly. Nevertheless, warning alarms should be going off and red lights flashing. Our way of life is obviously unsustainable, but we keep on keeping on living like kings to the extent we can to the limit of our income and beyond using credit. We, ourselves, are out of control as consumers. How can we draw the line at AI?
The danger is not that machines suddenly became wise.
The danger is that human beings keep mistaking convenience for wisdom, speed for depth, and extraction for progress.
From where I sit, AI is not the soul-crisis by itself. It is a mirror held up to the crisis already here: greed without restraint, creativity treated as raw material, and a culture so impatient with depth that it will trade the slow formation of the human mind for a shortcut.
The machine may be artificial.
The foolishness is very real.
I have been an active creative since I could pick up a crayon. Whatever materials I could get my hands on, I tried to make something beautiful out of them. I have sewn and designed my clothes; upholstered my husband's antique cars; and, painted. Now, I mostly work making jewelry, and paper collage. My parents never supported my need for art, when I wanted to minor in Art in college. So I minored in math; I never finished. Art isn't easy.
I have had nurses walk in, and see a collage piece that's taken me 12 or 13 hours to do, and they're shocked when they find out the time involved. I always get compliments, but they just look at me, and shake their heads. Mind you, these collages are usually 5" x 5".
I have tried to let being in a wheelchair not interfere with my art. Some days, it's difficult. AI cannot replicate what I spend hours creating, and putting together with my two hands. Computers can only think on a linear plane. AI will never produce a Beethoven, DaVinci, or Monet.