Old People and Artificial Intelligence

I have just finished reading Stacy Abrams’ new mystery, Rogue Justice; among other cultural and political trends, she tackles Artificial Intelligence (AI) – and she has made me ponder what it means when reality starts to warp on us.  In Abrams’ novel, people are threatened with videos of themselves saying and doing things they never did – created images which pass all reality tests.  The targeted people actually start to question their own memories.  Is this what AI will do to us – make us doubt our very sense of reality?  It occurred to me that old folks (maybe all folks) have their own experiences with bent realities.

There is, of course, dementia.  When my mother called me to tell me that little boys had ransacked her apartment overnight and put her milk in the freezer, she was sure it was true.  In fact, she was indignant when I suggested that perhaps she absent-mindedly had put the milk in the freezer herself.  So we know the mind is capable of creating realities that are not real, not true.

And alternate realities are not just a problem for oldsters.  I can remember trying to convince my young son that the monster he saw in his nightmare was not hiding in the house somewhere.  We all know those moments after a bad dream when we have to convince ourselves the nightmare is not true – we didn’t really miss that train or that exam, we aren’t naked at a podium with nothing to say.  Our brains are capable of fooling us.  And such delusions scare us in more than one way: we are twice scared – once in the imaginings, and a second time in the realization that our own brains could do such things to us.

For instance, there is the more malicious process of gaslighting, where we are convinced by someone (or something) else that what we thought was true was wrong.  Mean teenagers and abusive spouses practice it, and we have all been the victim of this at one time or another.  It is just another example that our grasp of reality is not absolute.  There is even a more subtle form of gaslighting when the myth of a happy family is superimposed upon a family or situation that was anything but happy – something that can happen in real time or in retrospect.

And then there are false memories or suppressed memories.  We all have them.  Who hasn’t been around the table with relatives telling stories about old times and not found out that there are as many versions of past reality as there are individuals?  “That’s not what happened…” responds my brother.  Sometimes there is a way to prove or disprove battling conceptions; more often we have to accept that realities bend in the process of becoming history.

Freud had a lot to say about human limitations in the face of unpleasant realities – he posited, of course, that bad memories were often suppressed and said that none of us really believed in the reality of our own mortality: “No one believes in his own death. In the unconscious everyone is convinced of his own immortality.”  Le Rochefoucauld said, “You cannot stare straight into the face of the sun, or death.”  (I might recommend here Irvin Yalom’s wonderful book about death, Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Fear of Death.)

Of course, we sometimes accept artificial realities on a temporary basis.  Coleridge used the term “suspension of disbelief” for what we do while reading a novel or watching an engrossing movie.  For the moment, we let ourselves believe what we know is not true – which is why we jump if someone taps us on the shoulder during a horror movie or cry over the death of an actor who assuredly has not died in real life.  But, as in dreams, we can pause, recalibrate, and know the difference.

But now, here comes the latest version of artificial reality, in which we will not always be able to tell the difference.  AI is a form of gaslighting, in that it is being done to us – and usually not for our own good.  We know we can be tricked, but we don’t know when we are being tricked.   What do we do – disbelieve everything?  Surely, this would be no way to live our lives.

We must remind ourselves that we all use AI everyday – to remind us to take our pills or go to appointments, to spellcheck our messages or documents, to verify prices on an item or hotel room, to get directions.  But, in those cases, we know what is happening. We know that the calm voice giving us directions is not real, nor is Siri our friend.  But my point is that we all have accepted AI to one degree or another – and this makes it even more difficult to draw the line.

And let’s not kid ourselves that we will be able to tell the difference between AI and reality.  We won’t.  But in our latter years, we have (hopefully) had enough experience to know that things can seem to be true that are not. We are going to have to trust ourselves (resist gaslighting in all forms) and arm our minds with a healthy skepticism, especially as to what seems too good or too bad to be true. We need to verify our sources.  It is bad enough when it is our own minds playing tricks on us, but it is even worse when something outside is orchestrating an alternate reality.  Am I worried?  Yes.  Am I scared?  Yes.  And we all should be.