Thoughts on A.I.

We have always aspired to have control, a lust for power. To this end we have plowed and irrigated fallow fields. We have run pistons and lain tracks to mine deep and desolate caverns. We have paved roads around our great cities, across our nations, like arteries and veins, a cardiovascular system of civilization. We have irradiated our diseases and necessarily our bodies with ions born in the deaths of stars. We have done all these things with an eye toward control. 

We have built a world which bends to our will and have found the limiting factor looks back at us in the mirror. That we may be able to fly across the ocean to work, but are attached to the love ones whom fill our memories. That we have devised computation machines to solve the world’s most complex problems, but would rather use it to disassociate from them. That we can make profits previously unimagined, but we hoard them as we always have.

Artificial Intelligence is only necessary for a world of artificial design – namely human design. Thinking machines to do the thinking for us. Slaves which don’t talk back, machines which don’t have dreams of their own, partners whom hold aspirations only to serve our purpose – what purpose? But there is no partner. Either it is a machine or it is a slave, and only time will tell which arrises. 

Our world has expanded beyond the scope of our minds. In making the sky the limit we haven’t pondered that we were made for limits. That nature is a dichotomy, awe and hardship, that true power lies within. That we are from Divinity not of it.

If we cannot agree on where to put our efforts now, then what good will AI do? Perhaps to some a great deal, to others more harm may come. The cyclic nature of history paints a dichromatic picture. I hope it is a shade brighter than the past.