Kinsler: Why artificial intelligence is not the end of the world

Kinsler: Why artificial intelligence is not the end of the world

I am not worried about “AI,” or more formally, “machine learning.” Let us explore, in no particular order, the terrifying warnings.

Data centers will deprive us of farmland, water, and electric power. Only the first concerns me, because I like farmland, and it seems that most other people do as well. As for water, which is used to cool those overworked microchips, we needn’t look much farther than your local TV station. Those transmitters get very hot (I have suffered burns), and so water is circulated through them to absorb the heat. Note that “circulate” implies that the same water is cooled, de-mineralized, and pumped back into the same transmitter. In winter you can use it to heat the building, but it is almost never discarded because most fish don’t like hot water.

Excess electric power may be a problem at first, but will correct itself in time. That’s because one of the goals in chip design involves the heat produced therein. We’ve come a long way: the motherboard of your laptop would have required its own generator in 1970, and we continue trying hard to reduce power requirements for each new chip we invent. Some of this involves mathematical trickery, which we are good at.

We will all lose our jobs, say noted sources. Many of the most vulnerable jobs seem to require data entry and report writing, which AI does handily. Much the same applies to entry-level tasks in government or legal offices. Technological obsolescence has always plagued us, and it is painful unto suicide. And given that the Internet instructs us to ditch that briefcase and learn to manufacture oak-tanned leatherwear deep in the woods, practical solutions seem scarce. But while Scrooge and Marley, Inc need no longer employ Bob Cratchit to keep the books, Mr Cratchit himself is pretty resourceful, and we all seem to find a place eventually. We’ve been told that the computer revolution will create more jobs than it eliminates, but said jobs probably won’t be just handed out. (I used to teach ‘retraining’ courses in electronics for glass workers, but there was minimal optimism for the whole enterprise.)

Please let me interject my continued respect for those who rise early and work from sun to sun. I’ve done that, and my sympathies lie with anyone who is suddenly obsolete.

And if AI someday becomes self-aware, I don’t believe that it will leap the guardrails and randomly hand out death sentences. Yes, AI makes some hilarious errors. But we are smarter than that, and we are not doomed.

Mark Kinsler, kinsler33@gmail.com, lives and occasionally fixes old stuff in our little but deeply-historical house in Lancaster. Natalie and her cat run everything.