An I

 

People fear artificial intelligence. Some people reason that the computer, more expert at sifting facts, balancing options and establishing a defensible position citing relevant evidence blah blah blah, will be more reliable, trustworthy and (in my case) better looking. So I have spent my time trying to quantify what makes someone human so I can pick what the AI lacks and use it as a partciular kind of baseline for evaluation. This way, I can quantify AI as lesser.

I often think of the cable special from years ago "Invisible Thread." The bottom line is that the humans turned deception into entertainment which other species haven't. Yay humans.

But the fact is that a similar truth is apparent if one really looked at what humanity's claim to fame should be. I put on the music from my uploaded songs yesterday and then I instructed my television to shuffle my songs and start playing. I was expecting a truly random selection of songs culled from a randomly shuffled selection of over a thousand pieces of music. Somehow, I heard a couple of the same songs which I had heard when playing music over the previous couple of days. It appears that even after "shuffling," the AI went back to currating and organizing, anticipating that, though I asked for a random shuffle, once I liked or disliked a certain song, it was the computer's mandate to keep feeding me similar music.

A computer can't accept that sometimes we want to lose control and engage the random. Sometimes we'll choose to lose (as a long term strategy, a short term solution, an experiment, or a whim for example), or do something spontaneous which defies every fiber of who we are, just because. Maybe we don't have or need a reason. This irrationality, or even a-rationality can never be anticipated or replicated.

If I ask for a true and honest shuffle of my library, I want to be surprised, confused, angry, and disappointed. Without that potential for disappointment, I cannot truly enjoy the happiness that comes from being fully and pleasantly shocked by a music selection. Sometimes people want to be hypocrites or want to choose nothing over something. We can demand to be wrong and still insist we are right because humans ARE capable of cognitive dissonance.

So am I afraid of our new AI overlords? No because they can never truly predict or impersonate a real person. They aren't capable of being truly random and irrational. The truly irrational sometimes acts apparently rational.