Artificial, yes, but intelligent?
By: William Essex
Tags: Technology, Artificial Stupidity, Dune, AI, Science Fiction

Traces of spice on Arrakis can look remarkably like seaweed washed up on Gyllyngvase Beach, Falmouth, Cornwall — and I hope, vice-versa. My picture.

Idly flicking through the appendices to Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) the other day, as you do, I came across a reference to the “Butlerian Jihad”.

This was (it predates the story in the book) an uprising against technology (strictly, “thinking machines”) for reasons not unconnected with their impact on the human (and, this being sci-fi, non-human) spirit.

Thought of it today as the radio told me — again — that within a couple of decades, Artificial Intelligence will have stolen all our jobs.

That’s the analog radio I mean, which switches on immediately, not the digital radio, which takes as long as a old-fashioned (very old-fashioned; old as in early typewriters and Bakelite) valve radio to orient itself.

I remember that the UK’s analog signal was scheduled to be switched off. Perhaps it still is. Analogue, analog. Little black thing, my radio, £6.99 from Asda, which used to be Associated Dairies and is now Asda, part of the Walmart Family.

Where was I? Oh yes.

Now, Dune is very much a book of its time. The gender politics are not exactly compliant with modern thinking, and the plot hinges around the consumption of industrial quantities of a hallucinogenic drug.

But it’s a good read, if you’re in the mood or mentally still in the sixties (can’t remember?), and I prefer the Butlerian Jihad to straight-line extrapolations from present to future.

Not so long ago, the internet was a counter-cultural haven with its own language and etiquette (I still have one or two of those little printed guides to the jargon somewhere).

Now it’s a commercial space fought over by global companies and governments — and all those trolls in the comments sections. Surveillance economy, anybody?

Facebook may be here to stay (or not; let’s not extrapolate from the present), but it’s not here to stay exactly as it is now. I remember when Amazon was a plucky little survivor of the dot-com bust.

And what are these “jobs” that AI is going to steal anyway? Units in a structured set of activities that Henry Ford would have recognised? Office jobs? Shop floor? Nine to five? Socially distanced versions of the Old Normal?

Abraham Maslow? Dolly Parton? Alfred P. Sloan? We make these structures for ourselves and hold them to be permanent — as if any worthwhile innovation has to be invented in a California garage, or, lately, has to be an app dreamed into existence by a venture-capitalised start-up.

“Jobs”, in the sense that some artificially intelligent thing can take over a repetitive process from nine to five, are a construct appropriate to a point in history. Straight-line forecasting mistakes the transient status quo for a kind of solid-state history.

Forget Coronavirus for a second — “jobs” are rubber-stamping writ large; the work of AI may be to do “jobs”; the work of humans is to find purpose, figure out why, fix the work:life balance, program the AI to be useful.

And if we’re talking about AI taking the jobs we want to be paid to do — you have to ask why, actually.

Why spend enough money to educate a continent on developing AI capable of doing jobs that a reasonably educated adolescent could do? Why not buy food and set up schools? Is there some kind of displacement activity going on here? What part of ourselves are we trying to avoid? What advantage are we afraid of losing?

There are more dystopian visions of technology expressed through our various cultural media, than there are AI-enabled utopias. We’ll pay money to see HAL 9000 misbehaving in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Mother not being straight with the crew in Alien, and of course we all know the logical flaw in Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics.

Not sure whether to mention Frankenstein or The Terminator here, but Asimov’s own comment on his three laws cites Faust (thanks, Wikipedia). I’d say the human psychology behind our drive to develop AI — and more widely to “harness the power of technology” as we understand it — is more complex than we know.

We’re excited — or trying to convince ourselves that we’re excited — by the idea that AI can transform our lives … but never surprised at the idiocies and failures of the Artificial Stupidity that is all we’ve actually built.

I don’t think I’d want to take too much of the spice melange (back to Dune again), although future-gazing is a side-effect, along with interestingly blue eyes, but I find it easier to believe in a Butlerian Jihad in which we all go back to buying music on vinyl, books on paper and gadgets (cars) that we can fix, than in a take-over by the extrapolated calculators that we call AI.