The main thing you need to know is that AI isn’t real. It’s neither ‘artificial’ (it’s just us humans making programs to run stuff) nor ‘intelligent’ (in the way birds, bees or we are). Business, however, is booming, as what we call AI is increasingly used to make amazing programs for us… and to control, centralise and corporatise power, and occasionally make money, or lose it, in the billions.
Jokes about rust aren’t funny.
Faking It, Toby Walsh’s insider analysis of AI, takes a measured, informed and insightful approach to what appears to be, and is hyped as, a new industrial and scientific revolution. His first sentence for example is, unlike most AI, honest: This book is out of date. We get the point he’s making – change is happening fast – but as a veteran researcher, Walsh is timely in covering what AI is, what it isn’t, and how quickly we need to band together in underground bunkers before the robot revolution.
I, for one, would welcome our new robot overlords, but, in short, I’ll be waiting a long while for any kind of genuine machine intelligence to emerge from the bits and bytes to evolve into something – a hive mind perhaps, a ‘Singularity’ – which might, praise be, save us from ourselves.
In Faking It, Walsh debunks AI hype. He starts with the long history of charlatans attempting to con the gullible with wondrous machines which can achieve, apparently easily, things that mere humans find difficult – from the Mechanical Turk (a small person stuffed in a box presented as a clockwork chess-playing machine) to ChatGPT (an assemblage of programs as likely to produce confident untruths as good prose).
But the chess programs, which can now routinely beat Grand Masters, aren’t even slightly intelligent. Nor are ChatGPT. which writes our essays, or Dall-E, which provides the images to go with it.
For all AI’s uses and flaws, their dumb algorithms are made by the most complex object in the universe, evolved from half a billion years of evolution – our brains.
The Mechanical Turk – the ‘chess-playing machine’.
Like the chess-playing robot that recently hit the headlines, AI easily wins the game, but has no mind with which to distinguish the difference between grasping the Queen for a checkmate or, accidentally, breaking its young opponent’s finger.
While Walsh focuses on an overview of the technicalities of our shared futures, the reality is that we’re already drowning in fake AI – Robodebt and the current horrors of Centrelink, for example, deserved an entire chapter in Walsh’s book.
Centrelink is claimed to assist people when it largely serves to punish and dehumanise them – it, like AI, is fake. So too is the tech ‘revolution’ in China, where AI serves to prop up the dystopian Social Credit System – which has parallels with Centrelink’s Jobseeker Points System.
In China, linked social and financial data (online privacy is a crime) is processed by the State in order to award points, which punish or reward citizens for their behaviour. This is backed by their entire internet being policed by the so-called ‘50-Cent Army’, the wumao, a quarter of a million ‘commenters’ who are paid by the State to steer online discussion to be pro-CCP and to report dissenters. The wumao are, as in the earlier example, an army of small persons stuffed into the back of the clockwork cabinet.
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So, while business and the churn of media love the click-baity hype from the profiteers of the AI industries – the crap apps that bleed you of your data, the ‘messaging’ you get in your feeds, the surveillance-state – all merging with the corporate and State sector to control choices and align the interests of the powerful. Information is power, and whistleblowers who expose the levers and mechanisms of immoral control of power – who open the door to reveal the dwarf in the box – are punished in a way rapists and murderers aren’t.
The greatest crime in this era is to expose the greatest crimes.
The rapidly improving mechanisms of what we call AI will require money and will, and those with the money and power to buy, control and direct that AI aren’t our friends. Bitcoin mining, using increasingly vast amounts of environment-killing energy, should be a criminal offense. Social Credit Systems are fascism on steroids.
The ‘intelligence’ in ‘AI’ isn’t intelligent, and it most certainly isn’t even the slightest bit conscious. The idea that we’re on the brink of computer intelligence evolving itself to become sentient is nonsense that ignores or is wilfully ignorant of what consciousness, and animal intelligence, is.
So, in the end, all the hype about AI should really be discussion about power, and the uses of AI to entrench and further that power. Perhaps that’ll be the subject of Walsh’s next book.
Walsh gives the last voice in Faking It to ChatGPT:
…the more we build, the more we will inevitably destroy. We are masters of the technology, but we make mistakes with it. We build it too fast, with insufficient knowledge. We fail to understand it. We build it in ignorance of its potential. We are constantly afraid that the technology will do things we imagine it can do that, in fact, it cannot.
Sometimes it can do far more.
Faking It by Toby Walsh, published by La Trobe University Press, 2023, ISBN: 9781760644826
Scriptwriter, author and science nerd, B.P. Marshall believes even conscious existence is a construct that doesn’t actually exist.
