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Artificial Intelligence
What Kind of Monster Is Artificial Intelligence?
A Personal Perspective: Zombie? Vampire? Double?
Posted August 18, 2023 Reviewed by Ray Parker
Key points
- As we articulate our fear of the unknown, we come to perceive the monster inside ourselves.
- AI as the double that replaces us might be after all the monster most worthy of our fear.
- Like AI, zombies are more efficient than humans, they take our jobs as masters of the Earth.
These days people want to talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI). While we have grown used to artificial intelligence in the guise of the auto-correct function and phones listening in on our conversations to direct our searches more efficiently, there is something about the whole situation which gives rise to trepidation.
The Fear of AI
In this age of apprehension, the development and availability of the latest AI iterations feel to some to be a culmination of our march towards unknown territory. If humans are guilty of imperiling the Earth through our thirst for dominion, then artificial intelligence may be a monster that continues this destructive, quixotic quest.
But what kind of monster is ChatGPT?
AI as a Vampire
Maybe it’s a Vampire. Instead of blood, it sucks our thoughts, our hopes, and our dreams. It never dies, bloated with research money it drinks up the real world by taking in human history in its training phase. Its excretions provide us hope and distraction but ultimately suck up our waking hours.
Trained on content from the web, like a vampire, it lives on by sucking our intellectual and imaginative labor and making many of our jobs obsolete. While individuals pass away, our combined knowledge lives on in the "blood" of the machine’s learned data set.
A fully-trained system, then, has the opportunity to ingest the questions we ask. We input these nuggets of curiosity to satisfy our earnest and errant desires. Our schemes and insecurities are fed into the algorithm. These are harvested for trends and associations across vast databases and networks of information.
With all these tasty, gratuitous, morsels, AI can create a simulation of endless time—of infinite fields of knowledge to survey. Objects hunted into existence glisten in a pantheon of the desire to know and control that lines every street of fiber optic cable in this round Earth.
If AI is a vampire, it seeks to replace us by aiming two perfectly sharp teeth at the jugular of our desire to know. How are our desire and curiosity to know calculated by the algorithm? It calculates the price of our boredom by following the cursor and cradling our incomplete sentences.
A catalog of the topics and questions to which we seek clarity is compiled in our entries in AI prompts. Inspired by natural curiosity, our constructive impulse is integrated into a learning set shorn of context and meaning to be registered as another anonymous piece of information.
The dense circuitry built up from ingestion of the vast graveyard of the internet illuminates but can also blur into confabulations and hallucinations. This has led some to wonder whether we are all like the split-brain patients studied by psychology professor Michael Gazzaniga, who confabulate hallucinations when they have incomplete information to answer a question. Is deep learning artificial intelligence that collects data sets analogous to an individual human’s collection of knowledge?
As we articulate our fear of the unknown, we come to perceive the monster inside ourselves.
AI as a Shapeshifter
What a monster we have created, one that is some mutant neither fowl nor fish, floating between land and air. Not only a vampire, but AI is also a shapeshifter. Like the body snatchers or The Thing, it takes on the forms of the objects it eats. Like that in Times Square, our LED Hagia Sophia, we find in its heart a hyperreal nightmare through the looking glass.
The mesmerizing Moloch of moving surfaces unfurls the multidimensionality of media. In the center, a totem pole of modems buzz like cicadas. They locate us, connect us, and move us along.
The skill that machine learning has demonstrated for mimicry may be the most monstrous trick we have played on ourselves. We have created an obedient double, a shadow that dances at our feet. Somehow, virtual redundancy transforms not only the way we work but the way we talk and the way we think.
It tenaciously simulates our ingenuity. In silence, men are rendered obsolete by machines and magically laid off and turned out of their homes for being comparatively less efficient.
AI as the double that replaces us might be after all the monster most worthy of our fear.
What kind of monster does that make? The creations of humankind dramatize not only our need for knowledge and progress but also our ingenuity for destruction and disruption of the natural order. Though our ambitions are great, even Frankenstein ended up one more harmless corrupter of the youth.
We live with the consequences of the enthusiasms of those who came before us and somehow shamble on with the effects of our carbon imprint. Forever chemicals course through our water sources and human waste piles up around us.
AI as a Zombie
Maybe like the other machines we have created which do our bidding but have no feelings or thoughts, artificial intelligence is a Zombie. After all, we created it to work without a will of its own. If it is conscious, it is but the consciousness of a philosophical zombie.
Inexorably, mindlessly, devouring us to become it. Some of the fear around AI is based on the possibility that it will auto-correct our intelligence, as in the Terminator series. Zombies, as we have learned from George Romero, are not entirely tragic: In some ways, they represent the Ubermensch who improve upon the mortal race of humans by being singular in purpose and anti-social.
Like AI, zombies are more efficient than humans, they take our jobs as masters of the Earth.
The Olympic Games of Meta
The recursive process continues as our discourse about these machines, including my slightly paranoid screed about AI as a monster, is harvested to inform their algorithms about how we articulate this tremulous, tentative future.
These are the Olympic games of Meta: constant uploading and downloading between the virtual and the real. Machines beget machines that make our lives harder and easier at the same time.
