AI, Authenticity and Automats

 "Turn the old; return to them.  Things do not change; we change.  Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts." 

~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden 

 

A new commercial keeps reappearing, just in the past week or so.  It shows a young woman utilizing a new AI "feature" to essentially trick people into thinking she is someone she is not.  There are a couple of variations of this advertisement I have seen, one in a personal setting and the other related to the workplace, and in both, after cleverly deceiving someone, she looks at the camera with a look of clandestine delight.  This is presented as a positive development for us all.

There are several obvious problems, if we are reflective and honest enough to consider them.  She is not being her authentic self, and were this to occur in "real and actual life", it would eventually be exposed she's not quite as clever as her deception has presented.  She would be caught without her crutch, eventually, sooner or later, and she would be set backwards on her path, all the worse for it.  The notion that is being presented here, in the workplace scenario for example, is it's better to "get ahead" than to be your actual self.  In the personal scenario, it's even worse, as what sort of a relationship would she expect to establish when she feels she isn't "good enough" to be who she is?

The lingering, repeating message is that we are "less" as our authentic selves and AI makes us "more".

As I was pondering writing this blog post, I was finishing re-watching a poignant documentary called The Automat.  It's about the history of a very special, innovative dining establishment that was once very successful, with owners who genuinely cared about the people they served and employed, who welcomed everyone through its doors.  In the case of the automat, innovation wasn't harming people.  It was actually helping.  How the automats ceased to exist is the poignant part, and we are led to reflect upon change.  I wish they still existed.  We could use these places today.  I was too young and never lived in the area of the country where they once were, but no doubt several of my family members (primarily on the "other side") who grew up in the New York City area (or arrived there as immigrants) experienced the wonder of this place. 

The documentary has a lot to say about change and human dignity - and about creativity as well.  The problem with AI is no matter how you feel about change as it was, change as it is today de-humanizes at a level well beyond any change before.  Will we see through it?

Treasure and nurture your innate creativity.  Treasure your beautiful vulnerability as a human being.  Don't let anybody tell you that you are "less".  You are "more" beyond imagining.  No artificial construct can approach what you are. The "supermind" they seek has existed forever, and it isn't what they think it is.  

 

 

Nature photo by Susan Larison Danz.

Voices

“Study the past if you would define the future.” ~ Confucius

 

Making the time to listen to voices of the past is increasingly establishing itself as a day-to-day pattern in my life.  The past has a great deal to teach us.  It can teach us about passageways and perceptions that led to more expansive places, and it can teach us about corridors that narrowed into dead ends.  I particularly appreciate listening to first-hand accounts, rather than second-hand interpretations.  

The voices of history can speak to us in other ways as well - through poetry, through music, through art.  

If we want to navigate productively and expansively through this current perilous era, we don't need to do it alone.  Others have seen things.  Others have chosen.  Others have spoken.  They have much to tell us.   

 

Reflection photo by Susan Larison Danz. 

Stereotypes

"As Napoleon once said 'What is history, but a fable agreed upon?'" ~ Dan Brown

Looking at History through the lens of what people chose to write about is an increasingly interesting pursuit for me.  Sometimes the descriptions surrounding a particular writer or an era of writing speak to me of our own times.  Today in an American Literature book, I was fascinated to read that not all Puritans, in fact many Puritans, did not fit the stereotype of a Puritan that I have essentially been taught since childhood.  

I was surprised to read this in an introduction:  "Puritans in general were lovers of life, their clergy were well-educated scholars in whom the Renaissance lamp of humanism still burned.  They did not forbid gaily colored clothes if they could get them..."  This passage did not neglect to mention that there were indeed harsh things that happened within Puritan culture, but that was not the entire story.  It said that many Puritans even drank in moderation, enjoyed the arts and made several advances in education that we tend not to think about (like creating Harvard).

History is far more nuanced than we tend to know.

 

Tree photo by Susan Larison Danz.