I’m Falling in Love with Ignorance

I have made a dogged attempt to ignore AI. I’ll probably go frustratingly inept to my grave regarding any additional attempts to improve or update my computer and software prowess. I don’t even like software updates for my phone, much less for pc-based apps. I’m tired of the constant, senseless changes software companies love to foist on us hapless customers in the name of ‘enhanced utility’ or ‘ease of use.’ You guys are so full of it.

Microsoft is my favorite, but Apple is working hard to close the gap. Let’s face it, they all suck. “Hey,” says the development manager, “let’s give Outlook a new look. I’m tired of the same old interface.” No better reason than that. It’s got nothing to do with efficiency. Having to learn where everything is again at least once a year is bullshit. They hide once easily findable features, change drop down menus, add and promote shit I couldn’t care less about. To top it off, once intuitive menus are less so now than they were ten years ago. Total crap.

Updates are just another excuse to introduce more bugs to an already unreliable or unstable app or OS, to increase my frustration level to near apoplexy, to test my vocabulary of four-letter words and my lung capacity to bellow them out. This should not be a test of my general health, blood pressure and heart rate! I go to the doctor for that (there’s a whole other subject).

Not more than a couple years ago, when I was a fully functioning aerospace corporate executive, I was actually pretty software literate. Decades of dealing with MS Office, Adobe, Apple and the like, I got pretty good at manipulating their apps to get what I needed rather quickly. Then I got old, unemployed and didn’t give a crap anymore. All I wanted was for these apps to remain somewhat intelligible. Sure, go ahead, add new features if you want but, please, don’t go completely restructuring the thing. We all invested too much time and effort learning the complexities of what you already sold to us, for a king’s ransom by the way.

It was irritating enough that you wise guys decided to base everything, especially your software, on the ‘Cloud’ so none of us would ever own a piece of software again and you could keep charging us every year for the same shitty apps with even more features we’ll never use, much less find. Where the hell is the state consumer protection agency in all this?! It’s a blatant ripoff to have to pay for the same product year after year. I used to be able to pay for an app ONE time and keep it for several years before your planned obsolescence and cutting off support kicked in and I had to break down and buy the latest POS update. WTF! That sucked, too, but at least I felt I got some value out of that.

Now you’re tempting the world with artificial intelligence. People are jumping in line, all excited and happy to turn over what little intelligence they have left to a bank of servers tucked somewhere in the mountains of Uzbekistan. They want to show everyone how they can harness the power of AI to make themselves invincible. I got news – all you’re doing is showing your lack of intelligence, your inability at decision making, your ignorance at critical thinking. Your brain is like a muscle – it needs exercising. All you AI disciples are going to end up like a bunch to do-do birds, unable to track, much less direct, your lives. “Oh wait, I have to consult with ChatGPT before I decide what to do.” What a bunch of losers….

Ok, sure, it’s kinda fun to see what AI can do, and frankly, in many cases it’s quite amazing. But just because it’s software in a computer doesn’t make it infallible. Some of the stuff that comes out of those algorithms are creepy scary and dangerous. It’s a bit like the other recent craze, the push for self-driving cars.

As a car lover, it’s predictable I would be loath to see the coming of people turning over their power to an inanimate object, to cede their independence and the concept of independent thinking to something completely beyond their understanding to control or fix. I guess it’s okay to give in to doing away with the dangerous, mundane and mindless chores we think AI and robots will ultimately take over. The problem is we appear ready, no eager, to give them the hard jobs, too. You know, the ones requiring brain power, advance thinking, critical human decision making – the ones that decide your destiny and maybe that of those around you? What the hell do they think will be left for them, games and meaningless distractions? How is that living?

Life is meant to be a challenge, to be filled with successes and failures, ups and downs, celebrations and disasters, joy and sorrow, love and fear – emotions elicited by our environment. How will we experience these, and learn from them without confronting mental and physical challenges that threaten to change our lives? Frankly, I think it’s a very scary thought.

We look so eager to hand over the process of creative thinking, to let AI ‘create’ an essay for us, to ‘read’ and critique the latest book for us, to ultimately do all of our introspection and the hard work of creativity for us. Where is the satisfaction, the joy in that? Experience is the foundation and the equipment we need to move forward, to learn, to progress as human beings. If we take the hard part of doing all that away, what is left for the human endeavor? Are we, then, even worth saving?

As the HAL2000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey said, “I wouldn’t do that, Dave.”