These days it is all but impossible to open the Net without stumbling over zillions of references to artificial intelligence (AI). What it is; the things it can and will do; the good things it will bring about; the fortunes it will make for those willing and able to make the fullest use of it; and, above all, the disasters which, thanks to God the Computer and His human acolytes, are just around the corner and, unless countered in time, may yet bring about the destruction of mankind.
In what follows, I want to cut the hype a little by providing a very brief list of some of those things. And, on the way, explain why, in my view, either their impact has been vastly exaggerated or they will not happen at all.
Claim: AI can and will make countless workers superfluous. The outcome will be massive unemployment with all its concomitant problems. Such as a impoverishment, a growing cleavage between rich and poor, class struggles, political upheavals, uprisings, revolutions, civil warfare, and what not.
Rebuttal: Much the same was said and written about the first computers around 1970, the first industrial robots during the 1950s, and so on backward in time all the way to the first steam engines during the first few decades of the 19th century in particular. Fear of technologically-generated unemployment may indeed be tracked back to the Roman Emperor Vespasian (reigned, 69-79 CE) who had the inventor of a labor-saving device executed for precisely that reason. World-wide, during the almost 2,000 years since then, employment has often gone up and down. However, taking 1900 as our starting line, not one of the greatest upheavals—not National Socialism, not the Chinese Revolution not decolonization, not feminism, to list just three—has been due mainly, let alone exclusively, to technological change. As my teacher, Jacob Talmon, used to say: I know all that stuff about history, anonymous political, economic, social, cultural, and, yes, technological forces. But, absent Lenin, do you really think the Russian Revolution would have taken place?
Claim: AI and the ability to manipulate and spread information of every kind (spoken, written, in the form of images) will make it much harder, perhaps impossible, to distinguish truth from falsehood, honesty from fraud.
Rebuttal: True. But so did the invention, first of speech, then of writing (see on this Yuval Harari Sapiens, which helped inspire this post), then of print, then of newspapers, then of photography, then of film, then of the telegraph, then of electronic media such as radio and TV. Every one of them was open to abuse by means of adding material, subtracting material, and plain faking. And every one of them often has been and still is being so abused day by day. Long before the invention of “intellectual property” thieves and counterfeiters were forging ahead. Photoshop and Deepfake themselves are computer-generated. But what one computer can generate another can counter; at least in principle.
Claim: In the military field, AI will help make war much more deadly and much more destructive.
Rebuttal: The same was said and written about previous inventions such as the machine gun, the aircraft, and the submarine. Not to mention dynamite which its inventor, Alred Nobel (yes, he of the Prize) hoped would be so deadly as to cause war to be abolished). In fact, though, it is not technology alone but politics, economics and various social factors—above all, the willingness of individuals and groups to fight and, if necessary, die—that will govern the deadliness and destructiveness of future war, just as they have done in the past. Caesar’s conquest of Gaul is said to have caused the death of a million people. Tamerlane in the fourteenth century wiped out perhaps 17 million. And even that is easily overshadowed by the number Genghis Khan, using nothing more sophisticated than captured mechanical siege engines, killed a century and a half earlier. Here I want to repeat a statement I have often made before: namely that the one invention that has really changed war, and will continue to make its impact felt in all future wars to come, is nukes.
Claim: AI will put an end to art and artists.
Rebuttal: A little more than a century ago, the same was said and written about film bringing about the end of the theater. Starting almost two centuries ago, the same was said and written about photography sounding the death-knell of painting. Need I add that photography and film, far from causing art to disappear, have themselves turned into a very important art forms?
Claim: “AI-powered image and video analysis tools are used for a wide range of social impact applications. They can detect anomalies in medical scans, assess crop health for farmers, and even identify endangered species from camera trap images, aiding conservation efforts.”
Rebuttal: as if all the things, and any number of others like them, were not done long before anyone heard of AI.
Claim: AI has changed/will change “everything.”
Rebuttal: Back in the 1990s, exactly the same things were said of .com. Yet looking back, it would seem that the things that did not change (the impact of poverty, disease, natural disasters, war, old age and death e.g, as well as that of love, friendship, solidarity, patriotism, etc.) are just as important as those that did.
If not more so.