The Case Against Artificial Intelligence
In the wake of recent AI news, perhaps now is a good time to take a step back and consider an opposing viewpoint.
Tariq Ali read the “How To Think About Bots” botfesto and thought that it was too pro-bot, with not enough consideration of the potential downsides of AI. Tariq is no stranger to artificial intelligence or bots; he’s participated in NaNoGenMo and created other story generation and AI projects. But he’s concerned about the potential downsides of AI.
In the essay, he takes a look at the potential for AI to cause unemployment, the “AI Winter”, technological dependence, botcrime, and the existential angst caused by AI outperforming humans.
(Don’t laugh: the existential angst is one of the parts of the essay I found most persuasive, possibly because it involves the intersection between an underexamined pitfall and the very messy human psychology that happens when confronted by a world that doesn’t need you.)
And, unlike the pro-bot point of view, this essay was composed by a bot after being fed content with contextual categories:
So this blog post has been generated by a robot. I have provided all the content, but an algorithm (“Prolefeed”) is responsible for arranging the content in a manner that will please the reader. Here is the source code. And as you browse through it, think of what else can be automated away with a little human creativity. And think whether said automation would be a good thing.