I’ve been anxiously following the rollout developments of the new AI programs, particularly the Chatbots. Nearly ten years ago, I stopped using Social Media on a daily basis because I became increasingly concerned about the health and quality of my person-to-person encounters. Whenever I would post something on Facebook, I would fret over it for the rest of the day closely watching the comments and like-counter. Sometimes this would carry on for days. Eventually, I saw this behavior as unhealthy, and so I deleted the apps from my phone and stopped doing status updates. I still have my accounts, mainly to check on activities in parent organizations for my kids’ sports programs. Writing a blog is still difficult, but at least on a blog I am able to fully flesh out my thoughts, whereas on a Tweet everything must be condensed. It’s difficult to explain.
Of course, the issue with blogs is that now even WordPress has an A.I. system that rates what I write based on what everyone else on the internet is writing. Right now, I score very low, and will probably score even lower after this post where I’m criticizing the very system that is rating me.
A while back, I got nerdy about all this and read several books by Sherry Turkle, a robotics researcher who wrote about the influence of our smartphones and social media on our relationships (see Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, 3 ed, Basic Books: 2007). She also exposed me to the world of companion robots: robots used in nursing homes, childcare facilities, and hospitals (pediatric and geriatric) to help provide a constant companion to patients who were lonely. I don’t know why, but I felt bothered by this. I’m okay with a robot vacuuming my floor, but being a companion? I guess if it mimicked a dog or something, but we’re humans and should be taking care of each other, right? Something felt wrong with the way technology has replaced the fulfillment of this fundamental human need.
So now, Chatbots. Now that they have rolled out to the public, there will be no stopping them. I Google everything. Anytime anything needs fixed and I don’t know how to do it, I ask Google a question, and Google gives me several hundred websites. I only look at the top three once I scroll past the sponsored pages. Pretty soon, probably sooner than we’d like to imagine, the Google search bar will be replaced with a Chatbot that will talk back to me whenever I google anything, pretending to be human. (If it will start my coffee-maker at the same time, I might someday warm up to it.)
I needed to very quickly explain AI to my kids. Thankfully, I ran across a very helpful article in the New York Times written by another concerned parent. In “The A.I. Chatbots Have Arrived. Time to Talk to Your Kids,” Christina Caron advises that parents should sit down with their kids and play with a Chatbot. “If your child hasn’t seen an A.I. chatbot before, you can briefly explain that a chatbot is a type of machine that uses the information it finds on the internet to answer questions, complete tasks or create things.”
I sat down with my own kids and asked some creative questions. My son is a ballet dancer, so I asked the chatbot for some ideas for side jobs for ballet dancers. Surprisingly, it came up with a list of about seven or eight ideas, including a choreographer, set designer, dance teacher, and personal trainer.
We then got more creative. My kids are into sports cars, so I asked for a sonnet about a Ferrari. It actually created a pretty decent poem in about three seconds.
By now you’ve probably played with it some yourself. Maybe you already use it to help you with your work, as many people appear to have done already. Maybe you’ve asked it to do your work for you, and, like me, feel a deep sense of foreboding dread at the thought that this free resource can do what you do to make money much faster and with far less energy than you can. If it can be said that human relationships have become expendable (i.e. turned into commodities) with the invention of social media, it seems now human beings are now expendable thanks to A.I. (I wonder what A.I. researchers are thinking here, since A.I. has the ability to program itself. It’s like a house-builder building a house that is able to replicate and make new houses all by itself. It’s like someone creating the very thing that could destroy one’s own career).
In a more recent New York Times article, Thomas L. Friedman, author of The World is Flat, a popular book on globalization, writes:
“I have a simple rule: The faster the pace of change and the more godlike powers we humans develop, the more everything old and slow matters more than ever – the more everything you learned in Sunday school, or from wherever you draw ethical inspiration, matters more than ever.
“Because the wider we scale artificial intelligence, the more the golden rule needs to scale: Do unto others as you would wish them to do unto you. Because given the increasingly godlike powers we’re endowing ourselves with, we can all now do unto each other faster, cheaper and deeper than ever before.”
Yes and amen. What will matter more in the coming years and for the lives of our children, I believe, is not how well we’re able to ride ahead of the wave of new technology, but how well we are able to embrace some of the old virtues: the simple care we have for each other and for ourselves. But we have to keep believing that such things matter, even in the face of an entire culture which, increasingly, does not.
Caron, Christina. “The A.I. Chatbots Have Arrived. Time to Talk to Your Kids.” New York Times, March 22, 2023, https://nyti.ms/3ZbZ0KK. Accessed 09 April 2023.
Friedman, Thomas L. “We Are Opening the Lids on Two Giant Pandora’s Boxes.” New York Times, May 2, 2023, https://nyti.ms/42kkjf2. Accessed 06 May 2023.