I won’t try convincing Sarah Connor.

If you follow the news even superficially, you’ll be aware that the world has a very uneasy relationship with rapidly advancing technology.  This tension has been with us since the first Luddite took a cleaver to a water-powered loom, and it will likely never go away.

           The difference now is the speed at which things are changing.  At best, it can give one a sort of psychic vertigo, at worst, it can throw you into abject terror.  For many, it feels as if the machines are on the march and we’re all about to be trampled under their cybertronic bootheels.

I take a somewhat sunnier view.  I’m glad it doesn’t take a week to travel from Connecticut to Philadelphia while being jostled around in a poorly sprung carriage over rocky, rutted roads.  Rather, I can board an airplane, that on the ground looks impossibly huge and ungainly, and complete the trip in the time it takes for my courtesy coffee to cool down. 

I understand writers who compose longhand with specially curated pens.  Or use an Underwood inherited from their great uncle.  Long ago, I knew a writer who could only start a new project sitting in her car, and only after cleaning the ashtray.  I have my own superstitions, such as always writing in the same font and point size, using indents and paragraph breaks with no space, and sticking to the same word count per page.  But otherwise, I’m all in on the Microsoft Word app living here on my Lenovo PC.  The first computer I wrote on was a Wang Word Processor, and the fact that I could quickly type out the words, while immediately backtracking, deleting, correcting, inserting and all those other wonderful manipulations felt like a form of magic.  Not unlike flying at 35,000 feet in a metal tube that weighs as much as a small commercial building. 

To me, it’s not the technology, it’s what you do with it.  Nearly anything can be used for good or evil.  I can use a hammer to drive a nail or to put an aperture in my neighbor’s prefrontal cortex.  The same airplanes that deliver me to Ireland brought down the World Trade Center.  They transport Doctors Without Borders and arms merchants.  The machines have no moral agency, they just do as they’re told. 

The current obsession is with AI, understandably.  It’s a very powerful tool, and it takes little imagination to foresee how it will change things in our lives, for better or worse.  I’m guessing the better will win out, in areas such as medical research, energy development and space exploration.  The downside is also there before us, especially if you’ve seen the Terminator.  There are commentators who think Schwarzenegger is already at the door, sawed-off shotgun and titanium skeleton poised to strike.

This may change in about five minutes, but as of now, AI is simply a super-aggregator, not really an intelligent being.  It’s wicked fast, comprehensive and clever at impersonations, but still doesn’t have the power to CREATE anything.  So far, only human brains are capable of making those quantum leaps, short-circuiting the deliberative process, jumping the walls of the maze and grabbing the cheese. 

If AI ever does come up with an original thought, entirely original and paradigm shattering, we better watch out.  But I wouldn’t hold your breath on that happening anytime soon.  

I’ve been thinking about all this because for the last few weeks I’ve been dealing with computer upgrades and the vagaries of assembling a new home entertainment system. The process is maddening and humbling at the same time.   But I’m sticking with it, because at the other end I’ll have something unattainable only a few years ago.

 

Technology is not my friend, but it’s not my enemy.  It’s just a thing, without a mind, without a will.  Ready to serve, but impartial to the master.  Humans still get to decide what to do with it all.  How they decide will still be a matter of morality and good sense, and likely dumb luck. 

That’s what we need to be afraid of.