Balaji Prasad
By Balaji Prasad
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” ~ Arthur C. Clarke
Old MacDonald had a farm. And he might cause some harm.
He bought a parrot recently: A hyper-parrot! AI. And it just won’t stop talking. If we let it keep on and on like this, it’s going to burn things into our brains, for sure.
When the hyper-parrot is not in your field of vision, you can hear it, but you can’t see it. And this is really really dangerous. Because your eyes help you see things that your ears can’t see. In fact, your ears can’t see at all! But we may be way too deep into this dysfunctional way of being already – we may have gotten into the terrible habit of seeing with our ears, and going mostly blind in the process, without even realizing this.
So, the hyper-parrot sounds like a human. It’s pretty good at this! And, if we have gotten into this bad habit of “seeing” through our ears, we will not only hear what it says, but also “see” a human saying it.
It gets worse! Not only can our hearing replace our seeing, but also can the words replace our meaning.
A word in the hand is worth truth in the bush?
Words are strange things. They can point to very different things depending on who does the pointing. It would have been wiser to have called “words” pointers because that new word for what we have got habituated to calling “words’ may point better to the underlying reality that is pointed at. There is no confusing something that points with something that is pointed to. If your finger points at the moon, you never confuse your finger with the moon! But when we point with words, and we fail to realize that words are mere pointers, can we be sure that we keep this distinction straight? Do our words become the reality? If so, what happens to the actual reality that we have now corrupted with our ability to produce guttural sounds? Does reality skulk away into some irrelevant corner, into oblivion? Maybe. Maybe, as far as the word – and language-space we operate in is concerned. Because that ends up becoming our reality, our very world, if we are not careful. And, arguably, we have not been careful, over centuries, over generations; we have gotten into some very bad habits that have taken us to parallel universes.
We get words thrown at us from every side. From books. From newspapers. From talking heads on TV’s. We are taught words, right from the cradle, perhaps even from before that moment of grand arrival. We are trained to play with words, formally at schools and informally everywhere else. We are taught to use these to influence, to use them as a means to achieve what we believe we need to achieve. As we grow up, words become our core currency. Along with their strong and silent cousins, numbers, that are as symbol-based as words are, but pack a gravitas that might belie their ability to deceive and distort as much as the words do.
A word in the hand, or a bird out of hand?
Let’s go back to the hyper-parrot. This brings a whole new dimension to our fascination with wordsmanship. AI is the name of this hyper-parrot. It learns to do the same kind of wordplay that we have been trained to do, except at an unimaginable scale. There is a new species of this genus of AI in town, something that we call “generative AI” that is really the hyper-parrot we are talking about here. It is aptly named because it generates. At scale. And it trains and trains and trains, listening to every man or woman or child, dead or alive. Also, at scale. It stands on a platform of shiny silicon that constantly feeds it with anything and everything that has been said before. And when we hear this bird, it sounds just like us. And we are still as intoxicated with the words as we have always been. And it can be worse than before because it will be right on many simple things, allowing it to gain our implicit trust. But it will often be wrong, even more wrong than us, on the really important things in life. Because it will homogenize the complex swirl of life into simple “truths” that are anything but. While we gullibly swallow these utterances hook, line and sinker. As a modern-day parodying Tennyson might say in The Charge of the Lied Brigade: “Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to eat the lie.”
This bird has flown. We cannot put the Gen AI back in the bottle. But…
Parrots can never be human
There is an optimistic view. If AI takes over many of the things that we have extolled as coming out of innate human intelligence, maybe we will start to realize that our human intelligence was not all that it was hyped up to be. We were always copycats, but the new copycat in town is way faster and better at copying and parroting than we can ever hope to be. So, as we have done in the past with other revolutions, we will introspect, dig deeper inside ourselves, and unearth hidden treasures from our depths that can help us boldly go where no silicon has gone before.
Balaji Prasad is an IIT/IIM graduate, a published author, SAT/ACT Online and in-person Coach, and K-12 Math Tutor at NewCranium. Contact: [email protected].
