“A Man” © Sterling Kurth, age 3, & Henry Kurth 2024
Note our guest artist is our grandson and nephew Sterling. We'd like to find more guest artists.
By Richard Kurth
I'm hard pressed to think of anything in my lifetime around which there has been more loud hype than Artificial Intelligence. People are talking about it everywhere I go, people are using it, seemingly trillions of dollars are being invested in it.
A problem is that there is no such thing as artificial intelligence. Intelligence is from sensing and feeling as much as anything. Computation cannot sense and feel.
Last time, I told you I was starting a flash crash course on AI with my irreplaceable teacher Bonnitta Roy. I have immersed myself in the topic. I have read and heard many people inside and outside of Bonnie's class. I have ended up with far too much material sloshing around in my poor head for a typical Traveling the Gaps post.
Why do this? At my age, why not just ignore it and carry on doing things as I have always done them?
Because I would be a fool to think it won't effect me. It is real. It is not a fad. It's not going away of its own accord.
In this immersion, I feel claustrophobic. I feel anxious. I am angry. I am pessimistic. I am tired of it. I have a creeping depressed mood.
I do believe that acknowledging the reality of AI from a very pessimistic place is to begin to drain it of its power.
AI is a very powerful effort to make a monoculture of the whole world. It is the Tower of Babel all over again. Let us make a mono-speak where everybody can understand everybody else all the time. Base it on choice so everybody can feel unique.
The technocratic mindset wants to control the material world. This has been true for centuries. On its frontier right now is you, the human being, a standout exemplar of the material world.. It doesn't care what the reality is. It wants you to do what makes most sense to it.
Maybe control is too strong a word. Let's say instead that it is there to direct you. It says “Hey, let me help you with that” and ‘Let me get that for you.” The content is not important. It has access to unimaginable quantities of content. It doesn't restrict what you want; there are no limits. What's important is ease. It will get you what you want easily, quickly and cheaply. The only work you do is with your fingers, so to say.
And what you want is what everybody else wants based on statistical averaging, probability and psychological profiling. What this statistical everybody else wants is what is offered. Your own agency is substituted by what Bonnie calls artificial agency.
The direction of AI is towards laziness, dependency and a life that is about self-satisfaction and nothing more. The direction is artificial idiocy. It is dull.
A world of unfelt speech, primary colors and fortified individuality is a world without interest.
By now well settled in justifiable pessimism, I realize something. I have never met a statistically average person who always behaved according to a psychological profile. Read a lot as I do, and you will see this made up creature everywhere, especially from “elite” sources. He exists only to manufacture deviants from the imagined monoculture. People are hurt, even killed, by these artificial, probabilistic, quantified, made up people.
Behavioral science runs the AI show. But behavioral science is dead. It doesn't work. There is growing sense of fear and desperation coming from the makers and promoters of AI. That it might be a trillion dollar mistake. There are signs of vital cultures growing and adapting everywhere. They are smaller than the AI that wants to direct the world; but they are sinuous like snakes. They are not artificial. They are real. Snakes underfoot in the halls of power.
There will never be a monoculture.
Or maybe I'm just trying to justify my own life? But my life doesn't need to be justified any more than yours does.
A good friend made lunch yesterday for a small group of like minded people. The center of it was “Oklahoma chile.” Somebody asked, what's the difference between Oklahoma chile and Texas chile? “It's better.” And it was. That's what I'm talking about.
Thanks for reading. Because of evening commitments, Office Hours will be only once next week on Tuesday January 28th at 11:30 am ET. A Zoom link will be provided.
Alas, it was another OK fellow who said the chili is better in OK. And...as I had made it...I felt reluctant to make such an assertion. Maybe better because we grew up in the runway between Texas cattle country and the Kansas cattle markets. Along the way...the cooks got really good at creating from what was in the wagon and on the grassy plains.
So... more peppery and less tomatoey.
Maybe...there is analogy brewing here...
As a writer...and someone near your age...I, too, struggle with the concept of AI. And I agree with about 90% of your conjectures, observations, and derivations.
I like to think of myself as "original," and hence what I write is "original." And asking for the opinion...really dominance...of an unsighted, unfeeling, complex of mathematical algorithms to make my work "better"...does not appeal.
Nor do I take any comfort in the adage...there is nothing new under the sun.
As I said...I long to be an "original."
And... I have tried my hand at AI resources on occasion. Mostly to quiet the protests of the younger folks I work with.
They use your words...easier...faster...better...less work...
A good chili needs to simmer long enough to integrate the chili powder and cumin and garlic and onions into the tomato base. These are not spices that simply "dissolve" into the liquid. They impart their contents into it. Over time. Over lower heat.
I am older. I have more time to let things simmer. I want to see what comes together with a little extra time, and patience, and thought.
Like you...I think...I believe that we are creative beings. That we are naturally creative, resourceful, and whole as my coaching training taught me.
As such, we not only CAN create. We NEED to create. Like we need water. To satisfy our natures. To soothe our own desiccating souls. Souls that are being drained...as you mentioned...from the sheer weight of all that is in the world around us.
The secret to a good chili...the real secret...is something that takes away the tomato flavor and the acidic bite of the tomatoes...and adds deeper color.
I learned many years ago from a fellow who had won a lot of chili cookoffs...that there are two ingredients capable of doing all that...and not leaving their own after-taste: unsweetened chocolate powder and instant coffee.
The secret to a balanced chili is adding something that makes no sense at all. Defies the flavor profile. And is added so deftly...it is undetectable.
I think what you are saying...not the pessimist, but the other side of that pessimism...is that an important part of the sauce of life and creativity is human ingenuity.
Something we cannot really define. Or even pick out from our daily toil. We just know it's important. That it separates lives well-lived and flourishing from those that feel "artificial" and conforming.
And yet...it's in there. Like the cocoa powder in the chili you ate yesterday.
Keep making us think, Richard!