stop scaring people

don't anthropomorphize plumbing systems

• Humans did not discover fire, they designed it

• Humans did not discover the wheel, they designed it

• and the genesis of AI is…?

Designers create and use technologies all the time. Unfortunately, most such ‘designers’ steer innovation using the process described by the motto for progress for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair:

Motto for Progress in the 20^th Century

(red notation added to original)

The general public is now being challenged with conforming blindly to the progress and threats of artificial intelligence (AI) technology because people, who should know better, anthropomorphized AI by using terms like ‘intelligence’, ‘learning’, and ‘consciousness’ making its real nature obscure and difficult to apprehend.

AI-related computer hardware, programs, and applications are technological tools. Tools — functional assemblies — have function but not purpose. Tool users —living systems — have purpose. Purpose decides what the tool will be used for. Function does not. Wise tool-users decide what the tools ought to be used for, not just how they should be used.

Computer systems are plumbing systems for electrons and photons, similar in behavior to what plumbing systems are for water and waste. During my training to become a guided missile technician in the Navy, I was told to use my understanding of plumbing systems to understand the more complex electronic systems I would be working with. It worked. Both systems were logical following the laws of physics. I was soon troubleshooting, fixing, and maintaining complex electronic systems that at first appeared to be incomprehensible to me.

Artificial ‘intelligence’ systems, like plumbing systems, have proven to be immensely influential and beneficial in the lives of human beings — but please stop anthropomorphizing plumbing systems! You’re scaring people!

Despite the ever-growing hype around artificial ‘intelligence’, AI is not sentient. It is actually ‘life-less’. These technological assemblies are not composed of living matter. Physicists, chemists, and biologists are very clear about the difference between dead matter and living matter. Computer assemblies and programs are not organic brains or nervous systems and are certainly not minds. They can be said to be ‘like’ (analogous to) some aspects of biological systems, but they do not obtain to any higher order of human capacity. Some AI researchers and commentators have begun to try to provide a more balanced perspective of the technology but obviously, much more needs to be thought through and acted on.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/29/opinion/ai-risks-safety-whistleblower.html

https://aeon.co/essays/is-ai-our-salvation-our-undoing-or-just-more-of-the-same

AI systems do not think, make judgments, display intelligence, engage in creativity, learn, communicate knowledge or wisdom, or have intuitions, or insights. They do not harbor grudges, eat too much, or look at themselves in the mirror. They cannot make an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ or navigate ‘epistemic freedom’. They do not have ‘free will’. They are composed of dead matter—silicon, plastic, metal, rubber...a functional assembly caricatured as the Banana Junior 6000 computer introduced in the Bloom County comic strip in 1985.

The Banana Junior 6000 Computer

Bloom County, Washington Post Writers Group

The integrated actions of these functional assemblies of dead matter are impressive, even awe-inspiring, and have proven to be invaluable assets to the human enterprise. The contributions of complex computer assemblies to human endeavors have proven to be essential in obtaining improvement in the human condition, increasing well-being, and promoting progress. However, such assistance has not come from the agency of another ‘intelligent’ being. And things often go wrong.

Customers and consumers are the purported beneficiaries of AI while the electronic plumbers are the technical designers behind AI. Artificial intelligence forms an interface between the two groups while serving the interests of the owners of the AI.

AI ‘Interface’

AI digital assemblies are animated by human design that creates rules of sequencing—algorithms—which, on occasion, display a functional capacity unfortunately referred to as ‘artificial intelligence’. But, the outcomes of animated computer algorithms are the direct results of the design decisions made by ‘electronic plumbers’ ­— their visions of what is desirable — on behalf of surrogate clients — the owners — and not of any independent machine’s ‘intelligence’.

Society —  in all of its manifestations — needs to have a serious conversation about who gets to formulate the design briefs for AI systems. We need to engage in serious conversations about the development of performance specifications of AI systems and the concomitant prescriptive specifications as related to stakeholders, customers, future generations et. al. We need to talk about who loses and who gains in the production and actualization of AI systems. We need to talk about how these systems are designed and for whom. We need to talk about who is responsible and accountable for unintended consequences. We need to talk realistically about the true nature of artificial intelligence as functional assembly systems. We need to design our technologies with greater human intelligence (HI). We need to determine how to actually design complex technologies and then act on that knowledge.