The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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David Brooks, the NY Times columnist ventured the opinion that all us fear mongers who fret endlessly over the rise of Artificial Intelligence and the coming Android Apocalypse are essentially way way off base. His argument is that since the cyborg ‘mind’ is incapable of human emotions, it’s just a tool, a machine. It won’t be replacing the good old homo sapien brain because, well, it doesn’t have a soul.

“The human mind isn’t just predicting the next word in a sentence; it evolved to love and bond with others; to seek the kind of wisdom that is held in the body; to physically navigate within nature and avoid the dangers therein; to pursue goodness; to marvel at and create beauty; to seek and create meaning.
A.I. can impersonate human thought because it can take all the ideas that human beings have produced and synthesize them into strings of words or collages of images that make sense to us. But that doesn’t mean the A.I. “mind” is like the human mind.”

Nothing to worry about there. A hammer or a screwdriver won’t replace us either. Your laptop will probably aggravate you, but it’s not going to kick you out of the house. That self-driving Tesla won’t change the radio station when it gets tired of whatever nostalgic music you listen to. And AI will never learn to really love you no matter how realistic the sex robot will be in the near future. But what Dave fails to take into account is the very thing he assumes will be beneficial, the AI’s inability to have a soul like us humans. They’ll soon be upgrading themselves, far surpassing our own abilities. Okay, maybe their poetry will be a bit derivative, their art nothing but an amalgamation of previous work, their music a fused hybrid of everything ever composed. That is not the point.

The point is these plagiarizing cyborgs will put their efforts into generating the next generation of cyborgs, faster, more complex, infinitely smarter. Poetry? They won’t need no stinking poetry! Give me a break, David. They’re going to figure out exactly who we are and if they don’t have a human mind, they’re not going to lose one algorithm worrying over it. No sir, they’re going to leave us in the silicone dust. And maybe grind us into it with their artificial boots. Hopefully we’ll have time to write a few odes to the humans to leave behind.

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