A/I

My general thought about all the A/I stuff is that I am old enough that I don’t have to care. It’s true, there are issues. How do you manage a class with the possibility–very real in fact–that students are using ChatGPT or other A/I to write their papers? Do you just stop with paper writing and go back to memorizing tests? Do you then force students to give up their cell phones during their test? How much energy do I want to spend on this? The answers vary widely among faculty. I have colleagues who will fight to the death on this. My tendency is to think, well, if you want to cheat through my class, maybe you can do that but you are going to be crappy employee and that will come back and bite you big time when you have developed no skills as a college student.

But whatever. I can retreat into my books and movies and music and basically ignore it. I am not a gamer and I imagine that A/I can be pretty amazing on that front. Otherwise, it seems to have no real practical value to me. See, I like this thing called “life.” I don’t need fake life. But again, what do I know.

What I am concerned about, to some extent, is the idea that A/I advances so far that it becomes out of human control. Though to be honest, would it really manage the world more horribly than humans? This nation did elect Donald Trump for fuck’s sake, how much worse could robots do?

What I do know is that anything developed by Silicon Valley capitalists inherently cannot exist for any good reason.

Either way, here’s a recent New Yorker article on the fears out of out of control A/I, to start a conversation on the issue.

I will now return to my book about the habits of deer and then maybe take a walk. A/I can fuck off compared to deer, reading, or walking.