Tag: fear of AI

Who Am I? Why Am I So Afraid of AI?

Here is one truth about aging that we don’t talk about often: we are much more ashamed of signs of mental decline than we are of the physical decay of our bodies.  We don’t like our aging spots or wrinkles, but they don’t make us feel inadequate in the same way that forgetting a name or an appointment does.   Why is it that none of the physical infirmities of old age shame me?  I am not ashamed of my grey hair or the fact that I can no longer hike six miles.  I don’t like the brown spots on my hands, but I am not really ashamed of them.  But the mind is different.  When I forget a name or a common word and have to fish for it, I can exclaim, “Senior Moment!” and laugh – but I really do not think it is funny.  I think it is a profound loss.  And that is not good for the serenity I have been seeking.

Last week my husband came in after a morning errand to tell me that I had forgotten to put the gas cap on and close the little door after I filled up the car the day before.  I had also neglected to notice the message on my dashboard that would have reminded me to go do it.  I felt awful.  I occasionally leave a burner on or leave a light burning when I go to bed.  And, of course, I fish around for names and sometimes ordinary words.  I have always been somewhat absent-minded (as was my mother before me), but it seems to be getting a little worse and more mortifying.

The aging of my physical body does not please me, but it does not mortify me.  I stopped dyeing my hair a dozen years ago; I wear little makeup and have not explored plastic surgery, although I did have my upper eyelids lifted when I started having trouble seeing beyond their droop. Why the difference?

We clearly don’t identify our selves with our aging bodies.  There is Freud’s recollection of catching an unexpected glimpse of himself in a mirror:

Jumping up with the intention of putting him right, I at once realized to my dismay that the intruder was nothing but my own reflection in the looking-glass of the open door. I can still recollect that I thoroughly disliked his appearance. (from “The Uncanny”)

Similarly, Jonathan Swift, upon being led across a room in his dotage, caught sight of himself in a mirror and cried out “O poor old man.”  And so cry we all. And yet, loss of the mind – even in bits and pieces – is worse.  Many of us fear it more than physical death.  Is the reason we are afraid to die not the loss of the body, but the fact that the body will take our consciousness, our sense of identity with it?

And is our source of identity the reason that AI scares us so much?  Artificial hips or implanted lenses don’t scare us.  We are grateful for them.  We don’t mind using motorized scooters if we can’t walk or using hearing aids when we can’t hear. No one is afraid of wearing glasses.  But do we want technology to replace our brain? If we could implant something in our brain to “help” us remember names, would we want to do it?

One of the best sources of how AI was developed is a small book, The Maniac, by Benjamin Labatut.  He tells the story of Johnny von Neumann, which leads into the story of Demis Hassabis, a developer of AI and the founder of DeepMind.  I strongly recommend this book – a lucid read on a difficult subject.  Hassabis finds no problem with developing a machine that can think better than we can, and he does.  One of the proofs is that his AI can beat chess masters, and also the masters of Go, a game developed in China over 2,500 years ago, with a system of grand masters known for their wisdom as well as their skill.  In 2016, his AI program took on the master Lee Sedol in Korea for the best of five games with the understanding that all five games would be played regardless of outcome.  AI handily won the first three.  Sedol was demoralized, but persevered and somehow beat AI in the fourth game.  The crowd exploded:

Outside the hotel, Lee’s fans were running in the streets of Seoul, chanting and celebrating their hero’s victory.  Even the team at DeepMind, who had lost, rather embarrassingly, were amazed at Lee’s stunning ability to create something out of nothing.  How could a man, however smart, defeat a computer like AlphaGo, able to calculate over two hundred million positions a second.  Surely it was a feat that would go down in history… something that all mankind could truly celebrate.  (The Maniac)

Why were they so happy?  Sedol had already lost the tournament.  They were happy because AI threatens our very identity, our purpose, our souls.  Needless to say, Hassabis was not happy.  DeepMind fixed AlphaGo and Lee Sedol retired a short time later calling AI “an entity that cannot be defeated.”  He said his “entire world had collapsed.”  Why would anyone play Go again? (I’ll come back to that.)

AI will not get old and forget names and leave the gas cap off.  It will get more and more perfect as my brain probably gets more and more unreliable.  But it is my brain.  It has brought me this far with its own memories and capacities.  If it were fixed, I would not be me.

In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke had taken up the subject of personal identity, connecting personhood to consciousness and memory:

For since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and it is that that makes everyone to be what he calls self, and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things: in this alone consists personal identity, i.e. the sameness of a rational being.  And as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person.  (II: xxvii: 9)

Linking consciousness and memory to identity is problematic in relation to old age, when changes in cognitive abilities may challenge our assurance of continuous identity.  I will have to accept that.  But that same consciousness is my personal identity.  To lose that identity to a machine would be a living death.

I do what I can for my memory.  I push myself to read difficult books, I do puzzles, I enroll in a French class. I create appointment reminders.  I check the stove before I go to bed.  But it is a little silly to accept that the body is changing while refusing to believe that our gray matter is affected too.  And perhaps it is even sillier to think we can patch up our minds with computer chips and not lose our selves in the process.  In the end I am less afraid of my aging mind than I am of AI.

And I continue to enjoy doing the things that AI could do for me.  I play the piano when I could stream Glen Gould playing Bach, I knit hats that computerized mills can make much more quickly and error-free. I do not use AI to write my blog.  There is a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment in doing such things.  But I had these habits before the advent of AI; I despair for the children.

In Capek’s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots and where the term robot originated), about the takeover of robots as they first serve mankind and then get rid of them, one of the humans cries that the only solution is to “help people return to their former worries and labor…there is nothing more terrible than giving people paradise on earth.”  Because earth is not paradise and our minds and bodies are not eternal.  And there is some comfort in that.

For more discussion of identity, you might try my past blog, “Was She Someone?”

 

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.