Sympathy For AI

AI’s promoters have filled our minds with breathless promises of wonder that may or may not ever come true, transforming our adoption from reasoned decisions into acts of faith.

This article from The Atlantic a few weeks ago says it’s because we’re struggling to answer the fundamental question at the heart of every conversation about AI:

“How do you talk about a technology whose most consequential effects are always just on the horizon, never in the present?”

It goes on to explain:

“The promise of something glorious, just out of reach, continues to string unwitting people along. All while half-baked visions promise salvation that may never come.”

In the interim, which most of us would recognize as the here and now of our lives, we’re left bouncing around fantasies of utopia and fears of annhiliation while obliging AI’s developers with the tacit obedience of our data and patience.

Our confusion and inability to accurately assess AI are features, not bugs.

The idea that AI is a matter of faith seems to contradict what we’d assume are the merits of relying on tech instead of theology to explain ourselves and our world.

Technology is tangible and depends on the rigors of objectively observed and endlessly repeatable proofs. It explains through demonstration that requires us to keep our eyes open to see its outcomes, not close them and imagine its revelations.

When it comes to AI, this recent study from the University of Chicago’s business school showed just such “an inverse relationship between automation and religiosity,” citing use of AI tools as a possible cause for broad declines in people identifying with organized religions.

In it, the researchers are quoted saying:

“Historically, people have deferred to supernatural agents and religious professionals to solve instrumental problems beyond the scope of human ability,” they write. “These problems may seem more solvable for people working and living in highly automated spaces.”

So, nobody fully understands how AI works, even the coders of today’s LLMs, and yet we are told to trust its output and intentions? Sure sounds like we’re swapping one faith for another, not abandoning faith altogether.

What’s left for us to do is pull back this curtain and reexamine that fundamental question at the heart of AI, perhaps best articulated by the Rolling Stones:

Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name.

Ah, what’s puzzlin’ you is the nature of my game.