Take The AI Train?

Zero-sum thoughts on AI

You must take the "A" train

To go to Sugar Hill way up in Harlem

If you miss the "A" train

You'll find you missed the quickest way to Harlem

………………..

All aboard, get on the "A" train

Soon you will be on Sugar Hill in Harlem

Duke and Ella might as well have written this song for today with a minor modification. Only now it would be cloaked in dark menace and Sugar Hill in Harlem, a place of dread. Rather, that’s one half of the binary viewpoint on AI; the other being euphoria and irrational exuberance that is an entire new religion (cue rave EDM).

AI as doomsday demon or redemption day saviour. It’s neither. It’s a tool. Our doom or redemption lies with us, for the most part. When assembly line manufacturing took hold of industry and in many ways our lives, the world must have seen a similar dichotomous reaction; jobs gone/life made easy/there’s nothing like a handcrafted whatever/less work more leisure/end of the world/brave new world. Well, that didn’t happen. People as a mass are unimaginative and there’s nothing new under the sun. The reality is that we know little of what the future holds but hey! prediction is a whole lot of fun.

AI might well be the endgame in a very long play but we have no idea how this will end. But the play was, is, and will be scripted by us. We have a predictable and consistent tendency to abandon responsibility and foist cause and reason on something else; a something else that is our own creation, either manifest or imagined.

This is but a prologue. No, not the current state of the world, its paranoia/euphoria; I meant this post. I have more to write on this subject. But I can say with certainty that it will be the product of my own decrepit, subverse mind, not the clinical output from an AI prompt.

I’d like to leave you with another song: the excellent “It’s The End Of The World As We Know IT (and I feel fine)” by R.E.M.