Pop 89: Fake Smart gods
By Madonna Hamel
In 1995, I travelled by train from Vancouver to Quebec City, where I was invited to perform in a festival that had one stipulation: keep technology to a bare minimum - use a microphone if necessary and maybe some lighting. As a storyteller, I’m used to working this way, and so I decided I would simply relate scenes from my voyage across the country, highlighting special encounters with passengers along the way.
Seated beside me for the entire journey was a woman with a bag of wool tucked between her feet. She was knitting scarves for all of her eight grandchildren, she told me. The clicking of her knitting needles synchronized with the rhythm of the train shuttling along the tracks, lulling me in and out of sleep as we passed through towns and countrysides.
I opened my performance with: “It takes a technician to knit a scarf, but it takes a heart to want to.”
Each one of those scarves is a crucial combination of love and technical ability. But it was love that nudged grandmother to insert, midway through one scarf, a thin stripe of red between a band of forest green and midnight blue. “What do you think,” she said, holding up the half-finished muffler? No doubt she thought that stripe reflected perfectly a vein of joy or spunk that runs through the particular child she was gifting.
I recently read on a website that “experts predict AI will become so good that it will automate virtually any cognitive task that people do today….The world of work was a joy for the highly skilled and cognitively gifted in the past. But that time is coming to an end.”
The grandmother knitting eight scarves, tailor-made for each of her eight unique and precious grandchildren became the hero in my performance because her “skill” and “joy” will not “come to an end” with automation.
She reminds me of the sewing group that meets every Wednesday in our village. They jokingly refer to themselves as the “Stitch and Bitch Club.” It wouldn’t occur to them to leap directly to a finished product. To separate the bitching from the stitching would be to eliminate their creative process.
The ranchers, gardeners and farmers of my valley are more likely to call Artificial Intelligence by other synonyms like: “Fake Brains.” They aren’t easily fooled by anything that begins with the word: “artificial.” ( “That should be your clue, right there,” they’d say.)
Just as cooking, quilting and collaging involve personal creative decisions made on the fly, rural work, like carpentry and construction, requires able bodies, common sense and thinking on your feet. Call it “manual labour” or “handiwork” - it’s all work that requires a constant mind-body dance and has no use for “Ersatz Knowing” (my own synonym for AI.)
AI is all about product. Its goal and promise is to go from birth of an idea to completion in the shortest possible time. This is an absurd and alarming stance for people like me who relish road trips. Or who take time collecting bits and pieces of memorabilia, eventually creating a collage when the moment is right. BUT, above all, who enjoy experiencing the many phases of growing, maturing, evolving and moving through life at a human pace.
To jump from the birth of an idea to the finished product is to jump from birth to death. Period. It dismisses the process of living itself. If we follow the AI ideal, life itself will be superfluous.
America’s VP recently promised that “AI will make people more productive” (ie: make more machines to do the producing), “make people more prosperous” (ie: make some people richer) and “make people more free” (ie: more unemployed, so, with lots more free time on their hands).
There’s a greedy motive behind giving our jobs to AI: you don’t have to pay workers. You can do away with health benefits and pensions and those costly retirement watches. Just program the machine and set the worker free. To do what? Drink beer? Troll the internet? Watch porn? And how, could you please explain to me Mr. VP, do unemployed “free” people pay for things?
“Our embodiment is not something to be wished away, to be replaced with something coldly objective and omnipotent,” writes Grace Hammon. She’s writing about Medieval Christianity’s idea of a punitive god, but she could be writing about AI. She’s referring to the apostles arguing over who among them is most god-like. They are warned that “unless they are as a little child,” “full of wonder, open to receiving and learning” they will miss witnessing heaven here and now, on earth, never mind any heavenly future.
In his moving essay, “Rage Against the Machine”, Paul Kingsnorth quotes an AI acolyte as saying “There is more God in a cell phone than in a tree frog.” This begs the urgent question:how do you define God? In “The Whole Language”, Fr. Greg Boyle warns us that our “notion of God is the most consequential thing in our lives” because “it’s what steers the ship. Our idea of God will always call the shots.”
I’ll bet the AI guy has never seen a tree frog, nor heard its song under his window. Nor, while crossing an open field, has he felt the flapping of bird wings directly overhead in the still of a summer evening. Or witnessed from his tent a moose rise, steaming, out of a swamp. Or felt the rumble of the earth under his feet as a herd of bison suddenly took off across a snow-covered stretch of grassland.
We can’t make a tree frog like we can build a cell phone. We can’t program a moose to sing Carmen instead of bugling a warning. We can’t breathe a soul into a manufactured central nervous system. Nor inspire it to knit a red stripe into a brown scarf for a boy on the other side of the country.