It's artificial, but it's not intelligence

So my phone's battery was dying, and as sometimes occurs to me in such situations, I thought maybe I should turn it off to save the last bit of the battery in case I needed it for an emergency. I pulled out my phone and pressed down on the power button, which had always in the past been the way to shut down the phone, but a recent software update had apparently changed that. I was greeted by a message that I had activated the "AI assistant" for my phone now, and what would I like to ask it? There was no option to shut off the assistant, or to shut off the phone, and I struggled in vain to pull up the phone's settings and find the setting that would reprogram the button to do what it used to. The phone died.

This was more than simply a minor frustration. I don't want an AI assistant on my phone. I just want to use my phone the same as I always have. I'm tired of the way AI chatbots have become so pervasive in our society, and I want it to stop.

Earlier this year, I applied for a job. To my dismay, I found that the job application process was gatekept by an AI chatbot. It asked me if I would prefer an interview on Tuesday at 11:00 or 2:30. I responded that neither was convenient for me. The bot said, "Okay, let me know if there is anything else I can help you with." It couldn't help me with scheduling an interview at a different time. It couldn't connect me with a human. It couldn't seem to actually help me in any way, and it was my only contact at the company I had applied to. I never got an interview.

I don't want an AI assistant on my phone, but I also don't want one on my search results. I don't want AI to sum up what's happening on my social media, or to help me write a post. I don't want AI to help me navigate your website or to rewrite my resume. I certainly don't want AI to manage my health insurance coverage or the operations of my government.

One of the biggest problems with AI is that the I is supposed to stand for "Intelligence", which seems to be completely lacking in the AI chatbots that tech companies are presenting us with. They seem to be rather accomplished at sounding fairly human, but not so accomplished at actually thinking about what they have to say. They'll say whatever sounds like the right thing to say based on sentences that they have read, rather than what might be actual fact. And that seems to be the state of the science as it now stands.

This is problematic on many different levels, one of which is the amount of misinformation that is out there in the world that no doubt was a big part of the data that was fed into these language models. The other part is that people seem to be very ready to trust AI to feed them "facts", completely oblivious to the fact that that's not what they are programmed to do. I had an argument with a woman on social media on an important topic, and on her side of the conversation, there was a lot of, "ChatGPT says..." I couldn't seem to explain to her that ChatGPT was not actually a source for factual information, and she just kept going back to ChatGPT for her source. I know this will not be the last time I have such a conversation.

The other problem with this technology, for those not in the know, is the fact that it requires a massive amount of energy to operate. Behind these bots are data centers that are using up a great deal of power, and also using literal tons of water to cool their processors. All of this just to supply users with more sophisticated sounding misinformation.

I don't want to be part of it. More than that, I want to make it go away, because I feel like it's hurting our society. It's not artificial intelligence, it's artificial stupidity, and it seems like people who use it stop using their brains. But like so much technology in the past, it's out there, and there's no putting the genie back in the bottle.

Hail to the Blog

I've been a lifelong Democrat (although earlier this year I tried to register Republican in order to vote in the GOP primary, but that doesn't count for much, especially since my registration didn't go through as far as I am aware), but I'm obviously not so taken with partisan politics as many people are in this country. In particular, I recall back in the day thinking that there was something wrong with the way mainstream media seemed to be criticizing the Bush/Quayle administration. I would often tell people, "If the best people can come up with to pick on Dan Quayle is that he spells 'potato' wrong, he must be doing pretty good!" I mean, think about it; our current Veep is shooting people in the face while on a break from supporting a highly immoral war that's funneling money to his friends at his old company. Could we get the guy who's a bad speller back, please?

So just this week, Anna Quindlen writes a column explaining how horrible it is that John McCain doesn't use the Internet. She points out that she herself goes online to see people's reactions to her work and, "...she's already been told many times that she's a left-wing idiot." This is what she calls being informed, or "tak[ing] the people's pulse." I was glad to be informed of this, as I myself have considered writing her many times to tell her that, and look! I managed to get informed about the issue without going online!

Quindlen is actually a very interesting writer, in no small part due to the fact that she is so very liberal. She's the sort of writer who can spout the liberal view on issues of the day in a very eloquent manner, far more eloquent than I can, and she can do it whether she's saying something insightful or spouting a load of crap. I remember clearly her saying many years ago that she was surprised there was controversy over the RU-486 pill; after all, it was a safe method of terminating a pregnancy without an abortion, and isn't that what everyone wanted? Seriously? Was she so dense that she thought the abortion issue was at heart about a surgical procedure? Crazed pro-lifers standing in front of abortion clinics are known to call abortionists "baby killers", not "questionable surgical practitioners". It was the first time I was tempted to write Quindlen and tell her she was an idiot, but not the last.

Of course, as I also hinted, she's written a lot of stuff that's come across as very intelligent, but I'm short a good example, mostly because we tend to remember things that upset us rather than things that are generally agreeable. Newsweek chose well when they signed her on as a columnist, I think. They seem to do very well in that respect. Even as someone who considers himself fairly liberal, though, even when George Will says things I don't agree with, he still doesn't ever seem to sound stupid.

But to speak to Quindlen's point, is it really so bad to have a President that doesn't use the Internet? Quindlen is right about a number of things. It makes McCain look old. But then, what doesn't? The guy's in his 70s, after all. Is it bad to look old when you are old? Hmm, maybe. I'm still out of work, and sometimes, on the few days I have an offer of an interview, I briefly consider buying some sort of hair product to get rid of my grey. Having grey hair is something I've actually always looked forward to oddly enough, but now I realize ageism happens, and I'd rather look my age or younger, not older. Ageism happens in politics, too. This is a year where one of the issues is that one candidate seems too old to be President, while the other seems (to some) to be too young. We like our presidents old, but not McCain old.

The more important issue, though, as Quindlen points out, is that McCain seems to be OUT OF IT, and may actually be so. Is it enough to have aides "take the people's pulse" for you? Heck, doctors do it. I can't remember the last time I had my pulse, temperature or blood pressure taken by an actual doctor! I think it's more important to have aides that will be honest about their findings. Often it seems the current administration is suffering from the problem of a President surrounded by aides that refuse to tell him anything is wrong. Imagine going to the doctor and having the nurse find you with a fever, but he tells the doctor you're at a perfect 98.6°F no matter what the thermometer actually reads! But is being "connected" necessarily going to change that in any way?

The Internet is like television, but moreso. You can sit and watch television and be blissfully unaware of what's going on in the world quite easily. There was a time not even so long ago when I'd have gladly watched the Cartoon Network 24/7, but will that make me any more or less informed than spending all day at icanhascheezburger.com? I happen to know for a fact that when Dick Cheney isn't busy shooting people, he spends a fair (and balanced?) amount of time watching Fox News. Would he really be more connected with reality if he took some of that time and spent it perusing foxnews.com?

The Internet is what you make it, both as a writer, and as a reader. From the long list of people who will probably never read my blog, we can guess the inclusion of John McCain, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, and Anna Quindlen herself, who probably is more "connected" than any of the others just named, and named more times in this entry than any of the others. It has nothing to do with being OUT OF IT or what amount of time one spends on the Internet. And if any of these people happened to come across my blog and read it, it's unlikely it would deeply change their lives in any way. We hear what we want to and see what we want to (and write what we want to!). When on rare occasions, a person reads my blog, they will come away from it with the same sort of benefits they come away from in reading a column in Newsweek: either "That's so insightful and true!" (because I agree), or, "What a (fill-in-the-blank-)wing idiot!" (because I disagree). Furthermore, as so many have observed, including Tim Berners-Lee himself, the WWW is largely a repository of crap, my own blog not excluded from that assessment. The Internet's new world of "pushbutton publishing" (is that Blogger.com's motto?) has some potential for changing the world, for people have observed that cream floats to the top. Crap floats, too.

In the modern world of politics, is the new rule "He who eats the most crap wins"? I guess you are what you eat, so why not? We know politicians are full of crap, so why not give them the Internet to help them mainline the stuff in its true, unadulterated form? (Did I just refer to "crap" as "unadulterated"? Man, I hope I'm single-handedly bringing blogging to a new low...) It's crap. Crap, crap, crap. The Internet has left-wing crap, right-wing crap, Christian crap, atheist crap, crap art, crap photos, crap news, crap fiction, crap discussions of current events, and of course just plain crap. Man, I feel better now that I've gotten that out.

Is it really such a handicap for a potential President to not be on the Internet? I'm on the Internet every day, and I have no idea what's going on in the world until Jon Stewart makes a joke about it, and I see the clip a few days later. Of course, then I still don't know what's going on, but at least I can laugh about it. Can I be President? I'm obviously not busy with anything else at the moment...

Paperless office of the mind

I was thinking last night about blogging. I was thinking about what it is that appeals to me. Thank heaven that it's not the publicity, because among the few hits I do get on this blog, the majority of them still seem to be looking for penguin sex.

See, I've always done this, even before the world wide web existed. I used to journal. You know, I'd get one of those little books with blank pages, and write whatever was on my mind in it whenever the mood took me. It even had some limited amount of readership, as I would always encourage friends who visited me to feel free to pick up a journal and peruse it. (I girl I was dating once read one cover-to-cover, which led to a few interesting conversations.) Someone once told me that largely what computer technology does is not so much make new things, but make electronic versions of things that already existed. Blogs are really electronic diaries.

But there's a difference that for me is key. I think what started me thinking about this last night was hearing someone say something like, "There's nothing scary about an empty piece of paper." I have no recollection of where I heard it or if that was anything like an exact quote. But I remembered that back in my journaling days, there was indeed something quite scary to me about a blank piece of paper.

I actually even once wrote a journal entry about it, and while I don't have it with me now, I remember it pretty well. I'd bought a new journal, and I began to write about an intense fear I had at the very moment the pen touched the paper. Here was a whole book full of empty pages, and while I tended to think those journals were overpriced, the actual value of the thing was as yet to be determined. An empty book held infinite promise, like a block of marble, waiting for the artist's chisel. It could be a book of recipes, a novel, a scientific thesis, a portfolio of sketches, an autobiography, anything was possible. However, once the pen met the paper and the writing began, all those infinite possibilities would disappear, and the result, no matter how great it might possibly be, could never possibly live up to the infinite promise of the empty page.

Of course, there's nothing rational about it. An empty page is, in a more tangible sense, nothing at all. To say that an empty page is somehow better would of course make no sense, the promise of anything without actualization is the delivery of nothing at all. Yet it stuck with me, every time I went to write.

There also was the fact that I felt since the page was a certain size, my writing had to fill it. It always surprised me how many times I ended up writing a snippet of fiction or a personal reflection that was worded so that it would just exactly fit the page size allotted. I was a slave to the physical medium of my writing.

And THAT'S what makes blogging so great. The medium of the web is pure information. There is no paper sitting there before me with the promise of anything. When I start a new blog entry, there is no space to fill: you can't scroll down the page to see the blank space below, as there is a presentation of nothing but a cursor, blinking and waiting. There's no permanence of the medium, and if I'm not happy with my writing, There's no ripping out of pages, crumpling them up and throwing them in the waste basket, there's just the click of a button, and all is gone! Or better yet, I simply can decide not to press the "Publish post" button.

There's no pressure to create greatness when nothing is being wasted but time. The internet is pure information. Our writing need not be stacks of dusty forgotten journals, our music need not be piles of CDs in cracked jewel cases, our photos are not limited by the quantity of film we can afford to buy. Hey, how many times have you seen this?

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Who would bother to write that out longhand? But in an electronic medium, we toss out a page of gibberish just to fill imaginary space. Here; I'll do it again, just because I can:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

There's something oddly freeing about that.

And what's my point? (Does it matter if I have one?) This blog is a journal in a sense, yes, but it is a journal that shares very little in the way of the physical properties of a "journal" as was known in the classic sense. Just as Scott McCloud wrote years ago about the idea of comics on an "infinite canvas", so all electronic forms of media have no limits in the digital world. Isn't a blog a journal with an infinite number of pages? Isn't a live webcam a documentary film of infinite length? Isn't 3D modeling sculpture with an infinite-sized lump of clay? The web allows media within it to be everything or nothing, all at once. It's exciting, but perhaps most of all, it's fun.

Thumbing my nose at Stephen Jay Gould

(Note: This blog entry has prerequisite reading, a short essay to be found here.)

My grandmother used to have a peculiar habit of collecting rocks. Collecting rocks in itself is not weird, most people have done it at one time or another, but most people do it because the rocks they collect have either a certain physical beauty or perhaps they came from a place that has sentimental value to them. My grandmother collected rocks because she wanted to be an archaeologist.

The place where I grew up was considered by many archaeologists to be a veritable treasure trove of artifacts, having been populated for centuries by numerous cultures. An interesting history there, actually; the Pomo tribe was in many ways like the financial center of the ancient California economy. They had a technology that as far as I know is still a secret to this day that enabled them to make stone drill bits they used in the manufacture of beads from seashells. These beads were used as a local currency because there was a limited supply of them made under strict secrecy and control of the Pomo. When Europeans finally made it to the West Coast, they brought with them the technology to make drill bits out of metal, and the economic system collapsed virtually overnight as everyone freely made counterfeit beads.

My grandmother's interest as an amateur archaeologist was, unfortunately, lacking in any sort of scientific rigor. Her back porch was often littered with various stones she had collected on her walks along a nearby creek, and when asked why she had chosen the stones she had, there were two stock answers.

1. "I think these are man-made because I see so many rocks just like them all over the place."
2. "I think this rock was man-made because I've never seen another rock like it anywhere."

I think anyone could see the problem with this logic. Aside from the obvious contradiction, the fact is that real artifacts will probably fall somewhere in between on the commonality spectrum, but in the end, the real issue is that relative rarity of an object is not something that's truly a factor in how likely it is to be man-made. (Those stone drill bits I mentioned are undoubtedly man-made, but are extremely rare, while old rusty nails, which are also undoubtedly man-made, are very easy to find when digging around in the dirt in that area.)

For those of you that read the essay I linked to, you might be wondering what all of this has to do with evolution, or maybe you see it as a transparent attempt to switch the topic to Intelligent Design. Well, ID is definitely going to come up in some form in this post, but I have a message for people on both sides of the evolutionary debate. In his essay, Stephen Jay Gould mentions

"I had always learned that a dexterous, opposable thumb stood among the hallmarks of human success."

I myself had never been taught this, but perhaps I was biased growing up with a cat that had opposable thumbs. I think what Gould is hinting at here is that anti-evolutionists are looking at the thumb of humans and saying essentially, "The thumb as we know it in humans is extremely rare in other animals, therefore surely we must have been designed." Uniqueness is indeed often touted as a basis for assuming intelligent design, usually, of course, as a list of things that are unique to humans in particular. Something that I have been noticing lately after reading a great deal about the platypus is that uniqueness is a surprisingly common thing. Every animal has something that sets it apart from other animals, or it would be the same animal, wouldn't it? And while the platypus is indeed very odd, odd animals exist everywhere. (I think on this continent, our "odd animal" is the hummingbird, but I'm sure there are other freaks of nature.) Anyway, the oddly unique qualities that are possessed by homo sapiens are really a non-issue to evolutionary biologists, and from a purely scientific standpoint, they shouldn't be, really.

The thing that I really find fascinating about this essay is that Gould (a man who, if Darwinism were a religion as some of my fellow fundamentalists seem to think, would have been one of its archbishops if not the Pope) seems to agree with some of the views that creationists and ID proponents espouse today. While most skeptics insist that the idea of a creator who designed life is preposterous and need not even be addressed as a possibility, Gould gives a nod to the concept:

"[I]deal design is a lousy argument for evolution, for it mimics the postulated action of an omnipotent creator."

Certainly Gould never admits the idea of a creator as a likely possibility, and in fact the whole point of the essay is to argue fiercely against the concept, but he does address the concept in order to make a reasoned argument against it, something few evolutionists even bother to do, it seems to me.

For those anti-evolutionists who may be reading this, I would say to you that if you actually read Gould's essay and it didn't give you pause, I think you're either being intellectually dishonest or you didn't understand his point. I think a big part of what makes his argument so strong is that he does take time to consider the possibilities presented by the hypothesized existence of an intelligent creator of the panda. In seeing both sides, at least in some limited degree, he's creating a case that is much more well-rounded than most I've heard. Creationists could and should take a tip from Gould. While I've been railing a bit in my last paragraph about evolutionists failing to address the opposition, I don't want to give the impression that I think creationists are any better on average in that respect. No ground is going to be gained for the cause of promoting creationism or ID by ignoring the other side. Evolution has a lot of evidence and many solid arguments behind it, and while, yes, it does seem highly unlikely that somehow billions of years of random chance caused inert matter to somehow coalesce and eventually morph into modern humans, simply saying that it's dubious is hardly an argument in itself.

Gould's argument is pretty straightforward, but needs an essay several pages long to explain the backdrop of the real meat of the argument; delving into the general morphology of the order carnivora, comparing pandas to bears and other relatives, explaining the mechanism of the human thumb vs. the panda thumb all lead up to a basis for putting it all together into a simple premise.

"The radial thumb is...a contraption, not a lovely contrivance."

Gould is assuming that an omnipotent creator would either give the panda the same thumb he gave other animals (especially since all the parts are there to do so), or he would build an entirely new type of thumb from entirely new body parts that simply do not exist in other species. There's logic in this, no doubt. The panda's thumb is essentially a thumb that is designed the hard way, so to speak, when at least one more elegant solution to the construction problem exists, and one might suppose other elegant solutions could be made. (If you were a mechanical engineer, you probably could think of one or two easily, I imagine.)

One of the things about this argument that I find interesting is that, aside from acknowledging the possibility of a creator, it also runs counter to what I've heard from other atheists. Often those who promote the idea of evolution over creationism will point to the similarities between creatures and say that those similarities indicate common ancestry. Gould seems to be implicitly confirming what many creationists will say in response to such an argument: that common design implies a common designer. After all, why should God re-create the thumb for humans when a perfectly good thumb already exists in other primates? It's that very argument that creationists love to use (and the average evolutionist pooh-poohs) that is the very basis for Gould's argument here. Why shouldn't God use a pre-existing design, or, if there was a good reason not to, why wouldn't God make something new rather than cobble together a thumb from second-hand parts, so to speak.

When I was a kid, I got some Legos in a McDonald's Happy Meal. The small collection of Legos was designed to make something specific, like a little racecar. Now, I could make that racecar, sure, but the real fun was in making something new and unexpected out of those parts. Could I position the wheels closer together so that they functioned like gears? Could I make a car that bore little or no resemblance to the intended car design? If I really wanted to get creative, I could have asked my parents to buy me more Legos, but tinkering was fun and stimulating. Is it a sure thing that God would not also think so? As I could think of my attempts to combine the same set of Legos in different ways a way of showing my creativity, could not God also wish to show His creative side by combining the same set of bones, muscles and tendons in varying and surprising ways? Is nature's variety God's way of showing us that there's more than one way to skin a cat?

While I do think that Gould's argument is very strong (and has resulted in my wanting to read some of Darwin's books, particularly the one on orchids, which must be a blast), what's really missing in the story here to truly address the concerns of a theist is more info on the theological side. While Gould takes time to unpack all the baggage of ursine bone structure, when it comes to dealing with the question of creationism, he simply assumes the proper action of an omnipotent creator.

"If God had designed a beautiful machine to reflect his wisdom and power, surely he would not have used a collection of parts generally fashioned for other purposes."

So many arguments against the existence of God boil down to this sentence with different phrases inserted in the underlined spaces. "If God was really good, surely he would have spared my mother Alzheimer's." "If God didn't want me to have sex with whomever I want whenever I want, surely he would not make it feel so darn good." "If God wanted me to believe in him, surely he would give me a million dollars." In short, assume you know what God would do or how he would think, and base your beliefs around that assumption.

The fact is, maybe Gould is right. I mean, it sounds reasonable. However, there are a lot of things that sound reasonable, but aren't necessarily so. "Humans are designed in a manner so high above the other animals in dexterity, intelligence and other factors that surely we are the apex of creation." That's something that sounds quite reasonable to most people, but evolutionary biology shows that this is not the case at all, or at least it doesn't follow in direct logical progression.

You know what I think? I think there are (at least) two things in the universe that are simply beyond our ability to fully comprehend. One of them is the full story of the origin of life as we currently know it, and the other is the mind of God. Maybe instead of fighting over who has come closer to arriving at unattainable knowledge, we could just enjoy the journey? Probably not likely, but that's my personal plan.

Super Monday Musings

So, as I start to write this, I have just finished watching Superbowl XLI. I've got big rants about pro sports, but I'm just looking to share a few odds and ends that flashed through my mind as I watched.

Nothing against Cadillac in particular, all companies do this, not even just car companies, but is it just me that gets just a little disturbed with giving the MVP a new car? I'm far from the first person to notice this phenomenon, but how do companies feel about giving away free stuff to people who probably could afford it with their pocket change?

What is the deal with North American sports that crow their champions as "world" champions when few outside of the continent play the game? (For that matter, when there was an attempt at a true world championship of baseball last year, the two teams that made it to the final game were from Asia, which I think says a lot.)

I noticed that the owner of the winning team gave credit to God for the winning season. Does any serious believer in God really think that God cares much who wins the Superbowl and/or takes an active role in determining the outcome? Whether or not there are atheists on the team (and there almost certainly are) is it really fair or right to credit God with the victory?

Was it just me, or were the commercials a bit more lackluster than they used to be? Although it was a very exciting game, I'm the sort of person who watches for the cool commercials, and in my opinion there were only about three or four that were really impressive, and most of them were ones I'd seen before.

Whenever I watch the Superbowl, and actually even a regular season game on occasion, I think about the technology of the television coverage, the salaries of the players, the size of the stadiums, and the costs of producing and airing the commercials. I think about all of that and I think that if the amount of money and effort that was put into professional football was redirected, we could pay off the national debt, solve world hunger, find a cure for AIDS, who knows?

Why are we all so fascinated?