Back when I worked for IBM in 1959, the mainframe in use was the new IBM 704. To give you some perspective, the 704 was in a gymnasium sized store front on the corner of 59th street and Madison Avenue. The console amused passers-by in the huge picture window with its multi-colored blinking lights. In fact, I remember one night I was at the console when a drunk at the bus stop actually unzipped his fly and urinated on the window. But I digress.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that the telephone in your pocket has more power by orders of magnitude than the 704. So why am I telling you this? What we are doing with AI is nothing new. We are just doing what we already knew for the most part. Just that now, we have incredible increases of speed and memory which allow us to do things that we can now do and we call it Artificial Intelligence.
The powers that be, worry that if we don’t legislate restrictions on AI, it will take over and control us. They are afraid. This is the science fiction view. In order for something like that to even be possible, we would have to develop a machine with the capability of the human brain. The brain is a magnificeent machine which we barely understand. AI does not work like a human brain. It simply imitates some of the capabilities of the mind by doing things with enormous memory and enormous speed at enormous expense in money and power demands. Think about it. A machine the size of a grapefruit, the human brain, can think, feel, create, remember, express itself and communicate ideas. And we don’t know how it does it. AI doesn’t do that. It is simply able to retrieve and organize data, nothing more. And without our brains, it would never have learned that.
Eric J. Larson in his book “The Myth of Artificial Intelligence” brings out the point that we have sold out our computer power to “big tech.” I agree with him. Instead of doing the research, the non-revenue generating research, studying how the brain works, we have sold out for money. AI is really nothing more than a revenue producing database manager with a huge data base and incredibly fast search capability. Oh, it can also interpret spoken words and generate speech. Bue we knew how to do that back in the 1960s. We just didn’t have the memory or computer power. Now we do.
Don’t get me wrong. The capabilities of AI are enormous. It can and already does benefit society. But the problem is not that it will control us. The problem is that it has created an industrial revolution of sorts which will create havoc if we don’t deal with it. The main premise is that increases in productivity must be shared. This has been the problem from time immemorial and led to, among other things, labor unions which demanded that the workers must share in the productivity. Reduced work hours, increased vacations, increased pay, employee benefits resulted from every revolution. AI is no different. We have to re-train our working class and see to it that industrial ownership doesn’t suck up all the benefits. Which they will do if we let them. The disparity between the rich and poor is what is out of control, not AI. If we want our legislators to help us they have to worry about us, our lives, our income, our health, not about science fiction becoming real and controlling us, as dramatic as that idea has become. It’s control by bullshit that we have to worry about.