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AI tools are not and never will be some sentient substitute for life. Life can create. Matter and energy cannot and never will create anything.
You can’t escape a mention of AI somewhere every day, multiple times a day. It is a technology that is here with us inexorably. Billionaires like Zuckerberg, Altman, Musk and Ellison are pouring truckloads of billions into it. Massive data centers are being established sucking up water and electricity from their surroundings. Every day there is a new wrinkle or twist or feature or staggering investment target—the latest being Sam Altman’s intention to invest $1 trillion in his OpenAI operations.
Does this mean we are on the verge of AI taking over everything? In a word, no.
One of the other frankly amusing stories running around right not is that of Tilly Norwood, an actress who only exists as an AI entity. Despite wide criticism of this concept, the production company creating it has doubled down by announcing an entire “talent” agency of AI actors. The core of the concept appears to be to save big bucks on not having to use human actors for productions.
Is the cost saving going to be an attractive selling point? Of course. But calling these massive batches of software talent is a bridge to far. And makes a great point from which to illustrate the biggest differences between AI and what it seeks to imitate: life.
Here’s a simple fact. AI exists on computers. These are of the material world. They are strictly physical universe, knock your hand on the table-top, matter and energy. Because of the complexity of the software and the massive amount of storage and computing capacity in these AI data centers, when you pose a question to an AI prompt, you can get a result that can appear clever, creative and downright intelligent. and it is up to a point. A lot of coding creativity by some extremely smart people went into creating this. Get that: PEOPLE. Code does not create itself. Even though you can get an AI to write code for you or even modify its own code, the cause point for that action is the programmers who created the AI in the first place.
That is a critical distinction. But an even more important thing to understand is that no matter how creative matter and energy can be made to appear, they actually are never the source of any creation. Ever. Think about that.
Material objects do not have thoughts. Material objects and mechanisms cannot originate ideas. That ability belongs solely to one other thing: life.
People get a lot of ideas when you use the word life. But let us keep this really simple. Life is you. No, I am not talking about your body. I am not talking about your thoughts. But YOU. If this sounds a bit confusing, let’s settle it right here.
Pinch you leg. That’s your body. It is that thing we use every day to get everything we want to do physically done. We read books, watch TV, have meals, go for walks, drive, bike rides, ad infinitum. Recall one instance of any of those activities. Got that image or mental picture? That is your mind or your thoughts. Got it?
Now you get to ask yourself a question. Who is looking at that picture? If you said, “Me,” move to the head of the class. You are you. You are not your body. You are not your mind or your thoughts. You are something else entirely. You are life.
You, as life, are the starting point of everything you do. You and what you decide to do or not are the source of your own creativity. If you enjoy the action of literally making something out of nothing, welcome to the basic function of creativity.
And now we get the crux of the biscuit: there is no life in an AI machine. The apparent intelligence—probably a better term than “artificial intelligence”—of these massive devises come only from the life interacting with it.
So we can sweep idea of a malevolent AI from science fiction out the door. Whatever malevolence comes from an AI system actually comes from those people who created it. The danger of AI does not come from an assumption of future sentience, but from the abberative thoughts, fears, bigotry and terrors of the people who coded it. It was not much of a surprise that Elon’s Grok was found to be spitting out antisemitic information, just recall his enthusiastic Nazi salutes.
An AI computing machine is not and never will be sentient. Sentience is what life is all about. No machine is going to replace your capabilities as a living being. Programmers can make an AI look like it has some imitation of sentience, but that is code, not life.
The decisions you make throughout the day as you progress through your life and from you. Let’s jump back to the example of an AI “actor.” There is no actor there, just code. No AI actor is going to do what Timothée Chalamet did in his portrayal of Bob Dylan. In one of the earliest scenes in the film A Complete Unknown, Chalamet sang a piece to the other actors portraying Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. In the scene, Chalamet held a note much longer than seemed necessary, but artistically is was magic. It was not in the script. It was not in the original song. It was a decision made on the spot by an actor determining how to best deliver his performance. Life. No batch of code is going to make this kind of truly human artistic choice on the fly.
In a proverbial nutshell of summation, AI is a pretty nifty tool when you get down to it. I recently needed an image of Donald Trump wearing a Russian-style fur hat. I described it to an AI image generator and had a usable shot in a few minutes. A friend of mine working on a business plan was stuck on building financial projection spreadsheets. After filling in some prompts in an AI interface she had complete spreadsheets she could work from. Very useful tools.
But these tools are not and never will be some sentient substitute for life. Life creates. Matter and energy cannot and never will create anything. It will always be life. And that’s you. Never forget it.
Marty Kassowitz
Marty Kassowitz is co-founder of Factkeepers. As founder of Interest Factory and View360, he brings more than 30 years experience in effective online communications, social media management, and platform development to the site. He is a writer, designer, editor and long time observer of the ill-logic demonstrated by too many members of the species known as Mankind. After a long history of somewhat private commentary on a subject he totally hates: politics, Marty was encouraged to build this site and put up his own analyses as well as curate relevant content from other sources.
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