The stock market was in the doldrums when Nvidia came along with ChatGPT and revived the techno-optimism of years past. A new innovation! Intelligence that is better than humans! People will be losing jobs to machines! The singularity is on the way! Resistance is futile, so we might as well buy the stock.
Indeed, the whole technology is misnamed. “Artificial intelligence” is really just a quick way to scrape the web for conventional wisdom, wrong and right. The advantage of using the tool is that it saves time. You spend five seconds instead of 10 minutes finding what you need. That’s useful but not revolutionary. And it certainly isn’t intelligence.
The bloom wore off this whole thing pretty quickly. Data from web usage reveal a surprising trend. At the very time when usage is supposed to be up because AI is taking over the world, usage has in fact fallen. This was not part of the playbook.
In some ways, ChatGPT reminds me of the COVID-19 vaccine—great name but ultimately misnamed. The former is not AI, and the latter isn’t a vaccine. They’re something else that glommed onto the good reputation of the real thing for marketing reasons. ChatGPT was supposed to solve all problems until it did not. To the extent that ChatGPT spreads misinformation—and it does on myriad topics—it is doing harm. In any case, the wild excitement seems to be turning to indifference.
This seems to be a theme of our times. The belief that technology will solve all our problems is being debunked, distrusted, and deprecated, falling into disuse.
It all seems inevitable in retrospect. Google’s promise not to be evil should have been seen as the reverse, a foreshadowing that it would someday do mostly evil. Now, its search results are massively skewed to favor ruling-class interests and its video platform of YouTube ruthlessly censors anyone who departs from regime narratives. This is still going on today.
Elon Musk mercifully liberated Twitter, but this provoked every manner of attack. Just one day after a judge in Louisiana told executive agencies that they cannot work with social platforms to censor civilians, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta released his direct competitor to Twitter. He bragged of the platform’s brilliant first day, but it was all baloney; all he did was tie the existing platform of Instagram to his new thing, called Threads.
Threads immediately started censoring posts. On day one! Realizing the scam, many people, including this writer, immediately deleted their Instagram accounts so that Zuckerberg could not claim success. I can tell you, it’s not easy to get rid of this account. Even then, the platform won’t get rid of it immediately. They hold you for a full month until they are good and ready, which strikes me as downright unethical. I want off now, but there is nothing I can do. They own my data!
To say that one of these large platforms is unethical is now hardly news. We’ve come to expect it. I once had massive trust in them. No more. Like many millions of others, I feel betrayed by the whole thing.
Technology has its place, to be sure, but it will not solve all human and natural problems. There are no shots you can take that will make a coronavirus go away. There are no pills or surgeries that can turn a man into a woman or a woman into a man. You can call whomever whatever, but chromosomal differences affect the whole physical and psychological structure of the human person. Why did anyone come to believe otherwise?
Incredibly, during all this wild and misplaced enthusiasm for technology, regulators are still busy degrading technologies invented many decades ago to the point that they no longer work. Washing machines, dishwashers, irons, showers, toilets, and refrigerators no longer work as they once did due to “energy saving” throttles. As for internal combustion, which gave us the Industrial Revolution itself, it’s a target, too. We are now going to use new technologies to get rid of old technologies we don’t like.
The pretense of power that the technocrats possess is beyond belief. They say that they will someday replace livestock with bugs and lab-grown meat. They can try, but it will come at the expense of human health itself. There are limits to what geniuses can accomplish. Not every disease can be cured with a pill and a shot, despite the wild claims. Not every seeming psychological malady can be repaired with a psychotropic drug.
For all the great things that technology once achieved, the costs of the new innovations are everywhere around us. People are poisoned by the pharmaceutical companies that purchased and now control our governments. And the insane experiments that imagine we can block the sun in order to control the climate will only result in more disaster.
To be sure, I’m seeing this now for the first time, following these three years of disaster. Like many people, I’m newly interested in back-to-nature ways of living and doing without all the gizmos I once thought would change life on earth for the better. All my “Google Home” machines are in the trash bin, and I can’t even begin to describe my elation at deleting my Instagram account (when Mark gets around to making it real).
Technology is the god that failed. We never should have made it a god to begin with. In the late 19th century, technology had a better name: the practical arts. That’s humane: coming up with new ways to make our lives better in artful ways. That I favor. But managing the whole of our lives via technocrats with toys and drugs seems like a very bad idea.
So yes, I’ll continue to use ChatGPT when it seems suitable while always remembering that no amount of electronic “intelligence” will ever replace the human mind. Let us newly cultivate the capacity and wisdom to know the difference between what is real and what is just another round of hype that will join Alexa and Google Home in the trash bin.
