AI is Full of Gorilla Shit

You might think that AI is useful. Maybe you’re right. Or maybe you have already been conditioned to a predisposed assumption, even a conviction, that AI is the solution to some, perhaps even all, of our problems. That it’s just a matter of time and tweaks.

In that case, I’d have to break Rule #1 of my own (revised) list of no-no things to do in blogging: “Don’t Insult Your Own Audience”.

What I’m trying to say is that you’re an idiot.

First off, I’m going to repeat myself: no machine can ever gain self-awareness or magically just have a soul.

It is not possible, however much you wish it, no matter how many movies you’ve seen, no matter what you’ve read, and no matter who says what on YouTube, for truly intelligent and aware machines to ever exist.

Does this upset you, this outlandish absolutist statement from a lowly layperson who once thought a motherboard was a reference to equipment for middle-aged female surfers?

Or perhaps you, like I do, have the advantage of distance and uninvolved perspective, and can see what developers do not? Do we share some measure, you and I, of trepidation, even fear, of what horrors can, and even have already, come from AI usage?

Then you may be even more widely read than myself about the subject.

If so, I offer you this praise: you’re nobody’s fool.

You maintain perspective and cannot be swayed by leading articles which hail artificial intelligence as the greatest invention of all time, humanity’s pinnacle of accomplishment. Because you know that’s not true. And you know, more than most, that like everything else humans have “created” or discovered, it will be used for evil, exploitation, war, greed and the ruin of countries by other countries.

It has already been in development for all of these things, and hackers, traffickers and spies are, and have been, calling for more of this deadly tech.

As it stands right now, I contend that beyond rudimentary applications, AI is useless or worse, especially when it produces anything that is released to the public or a community such as certain science disciplines, most notably without oversight.

Already misinformation has been disseminated by AI, and at present we cannot determine how much material is out there. In 2020, during the height of the pandemic and attendant lockdown, Microsoft and others laid off or fired thousands of workers. Working from home was great, but the articles and testimonials about and by people allowed that luxury eclipsed an ugly truth: millions lost their jobs. Some, we knew, were in the service or hospitality industry: waiters had no one to serve in closed restaurants. Bartenders, line cooks, master chefs, store owners and employees not deemed “critical”, and scores of others watched helplessly their way of life and their careers vanish forever. Businesses failed. Did they know, that last night they locked up and turned out the lights, that it was the end?

In the quiet that followed, late night talk shows broadcast from the host’s homes in a surreal spot of history that too many have already forgotten, so traumatized were they. Buried memories, covered over by whatever was convenient or necessary until now, a mere three years later, it might never have happened at all.

Except it did.

Millions died. A camera facing Times Square showed traffic sawhorses and nothing else, an image of post-apocalyptic, dystopian emptiness none should ever forget.

Empty chairs at the dinner table, in the living room, the nursing homes…and the empty beds to match.

Traffic, non-existent on rural and suburban streets: at night, so quiet that one felt, not peace, but only a creepiness, a sadness, despair: was this the end? Or how the end starts?

No one knew.

In places, the deniers: restaurants remained open. Spring Break in Florida. Reports of outbreaks squelched, or at least padded, by denial specialists and some news outlets who would go on to scoff at or darkly warn against vaccinations. None of it stopped people from dying, or from surviving, but with long-term effects.

Amid this horrific and tragic setting: MSNBC’s Morning Joe. Every day, the death count. Always there, on the right side of the screen. Every morning, a new total. You couldn’t look away. That intrepid crew never was known for pulling punches. Creds for that.

And then there was Trump, who, after screwing up and making psychotic statements, or, more exactly, spewing shit that got people killed because they trusted him, managed a fait accompli:

With most of his damage already done, with enough disinformation and confusion among the people, he “tried to be helpful”, but merely showed his deplorable ignorance and his need to control his team of experts, whom he often contradicted or even berated in press conferences. He actually, without any refinement attempted, suggested that bodies be opened to accommodate UV light devices and, worse, that products like Mr. Clean be used for clearing lung infections. No one in modern history has ever heard a US president say anything quite like that, but no matter. People apparently tried his “cure” suggestions. How many is not known. That even one person tried it is sickening.

And this is exactly where today’s post becomes relevant.

In the midst of Covid-19, Microsoft — MSN– got rid of its reporting staff, or most of it.

What stood in their shoes?

This did. And it isn’t funny. Imagine why; if you’re human, it shouldn’t be hard.

The article in the link is scary, but humans have been replaced by machines for decades, so this is nothing new. In Baltimore at the General Motors plant, there had been steady news reports since at least the 70s of robots on the assembly line. It wasn’t a unique case. Welders, painters, it didn’t matter; one by one, the jobs were no longer for humans. People flooded unemployment offices carrying their pink slips, held as delicately as calloused hands could have done, and another Maryland unemployment rate hike hit the news with ice-cold numbers that could never tell newspaper readers or local TV news viewers what it really meant. Not to those who had once earned a good income and were suddenly facing default on their mortgages. Feeding hungry children who were used to Christmas presents and hot meals faced an abruptly horrible reality of hunger gnawing on stale bread and cut-rate bologna. Marriages ended. There were homicides and suicides. Desperation turned quickly to despair and after despair, there was nothing.

AI is the new assembly line robot. Who dreamed, back in the 60s, that the major changes that happened could even be possible? That then, at the beginning of a career, that Westinghouse, the Bell system, General Electric, General Motors and other giants would fail, automate, or break up?

Jobs were never guaranteed for life unless you were a Supreme Court Justice. But most offered steady, union represented, honorable work. And if that’s been torn down over the decades since, mainly because of politics and its dirty-secret bed companion, the economy, then there is much more to follow. This is compounded by AI, which has its unshakable place cemented in the future like global warming has.

And both are deeply complicated subjects, which works well for tech corporations and politicians, but not for us, whether you once thought motherboards were oceanic wave gliders for MILFs or not. While the rich, powerful owners of this world think we’re still down here dropping simian feces, we’re still the only ones who get the final say, and we’re dangerously close to giving it up. We vote. We pay. We decide which is real, and which is gorilla shit.

When an AI writes about places to visit, and includes an entry on a food bank and suggests visiting it on an empty stomach, that is gorilla shit. It begs the question of how much more gorilla shit is out there, and has been since 2020.

It’s your move.

But know this:

Generations alive now have lived in some kind of terror all our lives.

The Cold War paralyzed us with daily fear that at any second, all that we know and love could be vaporized.

The AIDS epidemic made sexual contact a haunting thing. It could somehow go undetected for years. Nobody knew if they had it or not, despite early perception that it was a “gay” disease only “degenerate men” got. Then the truth was discovered. It was an everyone disease, and it killed.

9/11/01 brought a new kind of terror to the United States: there was no target, no place, no building anywhere that could truly be protected, and the world had become more sinister and dangerous than we ever dreamed.

Mass shootings haven’t let up. Kids who should be worrying about nothing more scary than report cards or being rejected by a crush have to go to school not knowing if they’ll live to see home again.

Covid-19 has shown us true terror of the unknown and the unseen. We lost so much. Grieve so many. There’s PTSD that’s real, damage we cannot repair. We went from using wipes on our groceries to wearing improvised face masks to getting all of the recommended vaccinations and we got rid of Trump. Quietly, President Biden helped us get away from the edge of an abyss. He does not get his due, not even grudgingly.

A call has gone forth from the political right: we don’t deserve a democracy so let’s find a dictator.

A dictator. What a pile of simian feces.

It has all numbed us. Injured us. It’s too much.

And yet, you must hold onto hope that we as a species can overcome. And, Americans, how it all plays out?

That’s entirely up to you.

Cowards!

I’ve been a coward all my life. Afraid of bullies. Afraid of pain. Afraid of being embarrassed or humiliated. Afraid of being abandoned. Afraid of being sick. Afraid of loving someone because everyone I loved had hurt me. That last bit was true until I was about 14. That summer I worked with my neighbor Larry. He didn’t hurt me. And I miss him. My first true adult friend from a time when I was a cowardly little kid.

Fear is partially ingrained in our minds, our innate selves. The other parts we have to learn ourselves. I once burned a finger and though very little, I of course learned to fear fire and high heat. I learned even earlier to fear my father. I remember riding a tricycle and he wanted me to come up and sit on his lap. I cried. I seem to have cried pretty loud. Like screaming, until he let me down. You know how you get fear like that. Yes, you do.

Fear as a conditioned response and fear of ordinary things like the darkness of night are very different things. But the mechanisms in the response end up feeling exactly the same. Fear sucks, we hate it. Unless, of course, we can experience it in a controlled way. Like watching a horror movie, reading a Stephen King novel. And sometimes, even that’s too much. If the input causing the fear response becomes too intense, we are no longer in control. We put the book down and sleep with the lights on. We walk out of the theatre. It’s okay; it happens all the time. Hollywood has test screenings to see how audiences respond. From the responses, they may make additional cuts before releasing the film to theatres worldwide.

When the first print of the original King Kong was test screened, the scene where men fell into a chasm and were eaten by spiders caused people to get up and make for the exits in haste. That scene didn’t make it to the original theatrical release. It was later restored, and the Jack Black film has that scene, but on crack and steroids and shrooms. I guess things are different now.

The original Frankenstein with Boris Karloff has a scene where the monster is watching a little girl throw flowers onto the surface of a lake. They’re pretty flowers. So the monster, thinking the girl is pretty, picks her up and throws her into the water. She drowns. Test audiences found the scene too disturbing. It was cut and only years later, restored.

Fear causes other responses from the”fight or flight” reaction to trauma to anger, unreasoning and thirsty for revenge.

But fear is healthy most of the time. It keeps us safe. We check our own emotions and hold our tongues for fear of starting a fight, getting arrested, losing a friend. Proper fear is good.

And fear has nothing to do with cowardice. Being scared enough to avoid pain or run from a fight is actually a pretty brave thing. John Wayne defined courage as being scared to death but getting in the saddle anyway. Sometimes, though, the right thing to do is to not get up in the saddle. It’s down to judgement and perhaps something as arbitrary as how we feel, physically and mentally, at the time. If we’re not up to it, then that’s okay. Maybe we need help. Maybe, some time. Everyone is different. Fear remains the same.

HYSTERIA, STRESS, ANXIETY AND THEIR TERRIBLE CONSEQUENCES

The one thing fear does, especially when coupled with a mental illness such as PTSD, that is not productive or desirable, is to cripple us. Everyday tasks, the most ordinary things, like going out to get the mail, become impossible. We’ve ceased to be afraid and we have become prisoners of anxiety and stress. It’s never good. Some can work through it; most will need treatment, such as drug and talk therapy. We need a support system and coping skills. We’ve learned behaviour that keeps us disabled. It is a bad place to be. Without treatment, people typically self-medicate, using illegal substances and alcohol. It’s tough to save them at that point, and you can beg someone to seek help, but they won’t do it unless they choose to do so.

But there’s another kind of abnormal fear, and often it is not seen for what it is. By the time anyone knows, something terrible has usually happened. Intense fear can only be tolerated for so long. The imperative becomes not quelling that fear, but acting on it. Instead of being a paralytic, it causes radical behavior fueled by anger. The need to stop the source of the thing causing that fear. The need for control.

I knew a man. His neighbor was a Holocaust survivor. Now, back then, in Pasadena, Maryland, and a few surrounding areas, Neo-Nazis were growing in number. They put flyers in mailboxes to recruit, and at the time this was not a hate crime in Maryland. They would also put anti-Semitic messages in the mailboxes of Jewish people. This man, he was old. He was old enough to have seen and to remember seeing the unimaginable. Stuff that even footage can’t convey. He would read these flyers, go inside his house, and get a baseball bat, come back out and beat his galvanized steel mailbox into an unrecognizable chunk of metal lying on the ground next to a steel pole.

I’d say that was a perfectly understandable and healthy response. Action from fear, action fueled by rage.

But what if people drift toward such responses when they are not healthy and not normal? That desire, that need to act, to end the fear and by immediate association helplessness, can take a horrific turn.

That’s when you get something like this. The article tells all there is to know, but make no mistake here; it should never have happened. How it ever became legal to bear arms in the capital building is beyond my ability to comprehend. But more to the point is, people’s fear of the COVID-19 virus had overloaded radicals who went into action out of anger. Their fear of catching or spreading the virus was gone. In its place, rage. Radical groups have a group mentality in the first place. Otherwise, no group. The scariest ones go “paramilitary” and buy all sorts of weapons, including assault weapons and handguns, and sure enough, many are owners of bunkers. You don’t even have to dig your own and line it with sandbags anymore. They’re sold, already made, ready for installation. They include air vents and a locking access hatch. They’ll customize almost any feature you can imagine.

I’ll grant you, the Michigan protesters are radicals already predisposed to a simmering mistrust of authority. And if measures are not taken, one of them will surely pull the trigger before this is over, initiating a firefight in which law enforcement and the radicals would both take casualties. Such a thing will not get anyone back to work, or get any mall reopened. It will be an event that can change the country in ways these radicals will not appreciate.

Being fair about it, I’d have to admit that the Michigan protesters are in no way representative of the majority here. But they’ve managed to prove two things.

The first is that they’re self-serving and wrongly feel entitled and use “civil rights” as a shield. They cannot tough it out with the rest of us. They’re cowards in the truest sense. Too cowardly to hang in there until we can see social distancing really work properly. Cowards. They cannot bear to do what the rest of us do, no matter how scared we are. Courage, said John Wayne, is being scared, but doing the right thing anyway.

The second thing these protesters did is more serious. They may not have broken the law when they entered the capital building armed. That’s true. But to do it in anger and cause the government workers inside to don bulletproof vests, and fear for their lives, is terrorism.

We’re all worried. Scared. We’ve been traumatized by untimely unfair deaths. We’ve lost jobs. It’s a disaster.

I wake up from nightmares you can’t imagine and realize my kids are dead and I’m all alone. But I live with my bipolar and my PTSD and I take my meds and I care so much about other people that my problems vanish on hearing someone else’s story. So I ask: are you as tough as I am? Can you hang with me? Can you do better than I can? Or are you going to admit to yourself, and prove to the world, that you’re really just a fucking coward with a gun who needs to scare the shit out of others to feel like you’re in control?

You choose.