Taming the Terminator: AI and Fiction

 There's a science-fiction short-story (by Asimov I think, but I'm not too sure - it could be David Brin) in which an Artificial Intelligence has been put in charge of the world. One of the things it does (among many, i.e. everything) is answer any question anyone may have: about the weather outside, the size of Mars, how much cake is eaten per day or what a word means. In short, the AI takes care of everything, including providing knowledge and information.

In a time of Chatgpt, connected coffee-machines and self-replenishing fridges, I guess that story sounds old-hat. The point of it, though, is that one day the AI stops working - I cannot remember why, but it does.

Forget about the food supply, machine-led agriculture, weather control and such considerations: the story focuses on what happens to people when their questions cannot be answered immediately. As you can imagine, those people are lost - they just don't know what to do, how to react, they have none of the knowledge necessary to take care of themselves, nor do they have the tools to know what they should know - i.e. learn.

In short: they cannot think for themselves, they cannot find solutions to simple problems (which the AI has always solved for them), they cannot begin to think of how to handle a basic situation. They do not know what they don't know, and they do not know how to approach an unknown: they're screwed, really.

I know what you're thinking: I'm a Luddite, an old fart who misses the Good-Old-Times of manual labour, candles and libraries. 'Another rant against AI from a bookworm living in the past'. 

Well: not quite. The point is elsewhere, if I may. 

The point is: who does the thinking? Not the 'knowing', mind you: the 'thinking'. Let's not confuse information and understanding - information and meaning (see the previous blog). They are obviously strongly related, some would say inseparable, yet there are different beasts.

In another context, George Bernard Shaw, discussing religious beliefs and world religions, has his female narrator say about God: 'He gave me eyes to guide myself. He gave me a mind and left me to use it. How can I now turn on Him and tell Him to see for me and to think for me?' 

What the girl objects to is not that there (might) be a God, or that people may believe in that God: she objects to having been given a mind, and yet being asked to let someone else use that mind. She objects to having been given the ability to think for herself and then see that ability taken from her.

Obviously, this post is not about religion, or belief: the quote above is an analogy we can use for AI, and it really doesn't matter whether you believe or not. What matters is what WE do with what WE have. And the truth is this: 

all of us have a brain, and that's pretty much it when it comes to what we share. Origins, money, education, background, aspirations, abilities, physique and all the rest: we're not equal in that. Bar some basic physiological characteristics (however important they are) and some truly unfortunate defect or accident, the one thing we all have is the innate possibility of thinking for ourselves.

Why on earth would you delegate that ability to something else, even someone else?

Ah, yes, because it's easier, quicker, more accurate (is it?), less hassle, hey, after all, why not right?, it frees time to do other things, and really if you're going to complain then why don't you complain about washing-machines, calculators or farming implements? You bloody Luddite indeed.

Well, I use Googlemaps: I accept that the route shown to me is the right one, that the way from A to B as shown by the machine is not only accurate but the best. I, like countless others, come to accept that what the machine shows is what there is, that it is true, and that alternatives are simply irrelevant - not worth considering, really. And therein lies the rub: the temptation to let the machine think and decide is strong, and, let's face it, almost irresistible.

Yet do consider this situation in the light of further AI developments, and ask yourself the question, again: who does the thinking, eventually? Who decides what you do, and how?

It's about agency, and the relevance of having a brain - it's about being in the world as opposed to being of the world, where your decisions are not your own, your ideas are not your own, your desires, aspirations, dreams are not your own. It's about not letting go, insensibly, small bit by small bit, giving up ground for unimportant little things so that by the end, you've given up the whole ground. By the end, the ground doesn't belong to you, you're just a guest, an inmate, and your agency is reduced to deciding between two alternatives created, thought up and eventually imposed on you regardless of what you may want if you thought about it.

That's why fiction is such a wonderful thing: it provides the material with which to think for ourselves. It doesn't matter if we're not Plato or Kant; it doesn't matter if we don't know this or that, if we can't think of everything, if we can't interpret everything. What matters is the material in the story and the links we can draw between that material and our inner life - a point I expand on here on my website.

What matters is the use to which we put our own brain - our own being - to regain agency. What is to be human? What skills mark us apart from the rest of the animal world? Meta-cognition, and the ability to think about thinking, to reflect on ourselves and others, to make choices (pace Daniel Dennett). 

that's why fiction is necessary, and good, and rich and plentiful and beautiful and wonderful: not because of style, or profundity, or escapism or whatnot: because of the infinite amount of ideas, situations, people, ways of being and ways of seeing, that it gives us for free (or for just a few euros).

The Terminator has its use, no question, but it also wants to dominate everything, and regulate everyone. If an apple a day keeps the doctor at bay, a book now and again keeps the Terminator away, or at least for a while. Do not let a machine - or anyone else - think for you, much less when that machine or those people are actually not good at thinking. 

Regain agency, feed your brain with ideas, and remember Lord Chesterfield's advice to his son: 'All you learn, and all you can read, will be of little use if you do no think and reason upon it yourself. One reads to know other people’s thoughts, but to repeat other people’s thoughts without considering whether they are right or wrong is the talent of a parrot'.

 

• G.B. Shaw: The black girl in search of God, Penguin, 1946.
• Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his son, 1728-1772, Oxford World Classics (2008)