A guy named Scott Dewing writes a technology column (Inside the Box) for the Jefferson Journal. In the latest issue he talked about Artificial Intelligence* (“AI Gets Personal”). He’s not optimistic, or rather, he’s not optimistic about current versions of the technology and sees this for our future:

. . . the universe will descend into a morass of machine-generated content that will self-optimize until genuine human creativity is obliterated and all art becomes a bland panoply of monotonous mediocrity.

It’s hard to state it more plainly and it’s hard to argue with! A capitalist system will always seek to optimize profit, and any new technology will ultimately survive only if it makes money. AI is very expensive. It’s going to have to pay for itself at some point. Absorbing all of human knowledge into a gigantic silicon Cuisinart and then spitting it out as personal “knowledge smoothies” for everyone on the planet ain’t gonna be cheap. And it may not be what is best for us. See above quote.

In the article Mr. Dewing expounds a notion of a more “personal” AI. That is, the current “generative” AI should exist to complement us, to enhance our work, and not to replace us. In fact, it ought to help us be better people. As Dewing says “generative AI learns about the world while personal AI learns about you.”

Indeed. All our inventions ought to help us. And if our gadgets don’t help us be better people, maybe we ought to stop making them.

*Artificial Intelligence is neither artificial nor intelligent. But the term “AI” is what we’ve got so we are stuck with it.