Guest Post by The Zman
Every day, we are told the artificial intelligence is not a science fiction fantasy, but a reality of modern life. Crimes are solved using AI and the military is supposedly using it to fight the forever wars. Microsoft regularly runs ads explaining that thanks to AI, the modern world will run just fine without white people. IBM goes further, claiming their artificial intelligence robots are already running large swaths of the world. The robot revolution is here and humans are being replaced with machines.
The target audience for these ads is a question, as the people watching television are not the people deciding whether to use IBM or Microsoft for the artificial intelligence requirements. It’s an example of how the custodial state has evolved. These ads are not about moving product or even improving the image of the firms. It is about conditioning people to the idea that they are wards of the state. Not only will they have no role in how their world is managed, they should not even bother thinking about it.
Of course, there is the matter of the AI itself. Everyone reading this post has had the experience of seeing ads on every web page, for things they bought six months ago from an on-line retailer. Maybe you just did a search and clicked on one of the ad links on Google. The result is every page that contains ads will display the product to you until you make the same mistake with a different product. Billions have been invested in smart advertising on-line yet the robots remain vexed by your search habits.
Then we have the companies supposedly at the forefront of artificial intelligence, like Microsoft and IBM. Anyone who has done business with Microsoft will tell you it is every bit as nonsensical as the government. Their “partner portals” appear to have been designed by people who hate Microsoft and their vendors. Then you have IBM, which is no longer an American company. It is now reliant on slave labor from the Orient. Most of its workforce is now un-American. It’s mostly a sweatshop now.
That brings us to the people these tech giants rely upon to write their code and engineer their products. Talk to people familiar with the code base of Facebook, Twitter and the big software-as-a-service providers and you learn it is a house of cards. Most of the code was thrown together in a rush using cheap labor from the Orient. As a result, the maintenance costs continue to rise, necessitating more outsourcing to places with even cheaper labor costs. We’re not far from having African coding shops.
That assumes this can go on forever. The Boeing 737 Max airplane that is riddled with so many problems may be a glimpse of the future. According to the news, they outsourced the coding for the planes “intelligence” to programming sweatshops on the Indian subcontinent. India is a land that struggles to manage basic sanitation, yet they are relied upon to produce complex software for complex systems. Perhaps someone should have told IBM’s Watson about what goes on in the Ganges.
The reality of artificial intelligence is that it is not here and it is not coming. One reason is we really don’t understand human intelligence. We have some sense of it, as in person X is smarter than person Y. We have some tests that give us an insight into individual and group intelligence, but those tests are imperfect. In fact, the so-called Flynn Effect may be the result of the flaws in testing. We may be picking up increases in things that are not a great influence on general intelligence.
When it comes to the biology of intelligence, science has identified about 50 alleles that negatively or positively affect intelligence. Think of them like the old dip-switches from the early days of computing. Some will positively impact IQ if closed, while having no impact if open. Others will negatively impact IQ if closed. Steven Hsu is involved in a project that one days hopes to be able to help parents select embryos for the highest chance of maximum intelligence, based on these correlations.
The fact is though, we really don’t understand human intelligence or human decision making very well. Therefore, creating artificial versions of something we don’t understand is unlikely. What we are calling AI today is just the result of technological progress in more mundane areas like disk capacity and bandwidth. We have an over capacity for data storage and all the bandwidth we need to connect it. That allows for faster processing of the same old boring tasks we have been performing for years.
There’s something else that works against the robot revolution. The smart fraction of the human race is getting dumber, not smarter. This is increasingly obvious to those who follow politics and current events. You can just look around your daily life and see that the basics of society are grinding to a halt in the West. Ed Dutton’s book, At Our Wits’ End, goes into examples and explanations for why we are getting dumber. Smart people in the West have fewer children and over time the results are manifest.
Of course, those Western populations have been the smart fraction of humanity for about 500 years now. The Chinese are certainly smart and there are a lot of them, but they have other characteristic that make them a poor substitute. They had 1000 years to take up the role of being the world’s smart fraction. Instead they created an insular society and put their smart people at work on astrology, calligraphy and turning the body parts of exotic animals into aphrodisiacs. They will not be the new smart fraction.
Then we have the swelling populations of the dumb fraction. Sub-Saharan Africa is experiencing a population boom, which promises to flood the West. When people from Congo, the most backward place on earth, are turning up on the American southern border, it is fair to assume the West will be overrun by Africans. How many 85-IQ Africans does it take to sink the West? Detroit and Baltimore suggest a population that exceeds 25% is about the point where everything turns negative.
The reality of AI is it is mostly an advertising campaign at this point. What it is selling is the legacy idea of the custodial state. It’s a bit of the distraction so you don’t notice what is happening in your communities, workplace and even your family. It’s a campaign for staying the course and building out the multicultural custodial state that will solve the problems of diversity. The suicidal polices of the ruling class will be solved by machines that do not exist and probably will never exist, because we are ruled by fools.
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As a programmer – AI is all bullshit. 737 Max / Tesla’s / self driving cars – all bullshit.
Give it time. It may not come in 20 years, but 200… 1,000? It may never achieve consciousness, but from the outside it will present itself as being self-aware. A mere 50 years ago NASA’s computers were glorified adding machines. Now my phone can guess from context what word I’m trying to type – and complete it for me.
Computers are still glorified adding machines.
By the way, the word I’m usually trying to type is “reacharound”
If they say it, it probably isn’t true.
But just like with the Moon landings, if you want to believe it, knock yourself out.
Easy HS, I saw a cow jump over the moon once.
AI would sell itself if it were the real deal.
It would not need Orwellian advertisements and a PR campaign.
Anyone studying neuroscience knows what AI is not here or coming. Good article.
Humanity has always passed down information from generation to generation from word of mouth.
With AI human information is being passed on to AI without word of mouth passing to the next generation.
AI is not life.
Around 80% of investments are now automated. One agent can handle the investments portfolio of hundreds of people- until it can’t.
Even a 1 % error results in thousands if not millions of people having significant problems across a bewildering array of govt interfaces etc. For example,know anyone stuck on the no fly lists? Try and get off of it.