Simple past, complex future

In 1960, it cost about two dollars a month to get a copy of the Macon Telegraph or Atlanta Journal or the Savannah Morning News delivered to your front door every day. The minimum wage then was $1.00 an hour, but most part-time jobs started you off at closer to fifty cents. The majority of news in those days was delivered by the UPI and AP wire services, radio, newspaper, magazines and black and white TV. Three networks with newsmen like Walter Cronkite, Ed Newman, Edward R. Murrow, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley appeared on 15 minute, and in later years on 30 minute newscasts once a day a little after suppertime. That was it. That was all we needed. No posts, no podcasts, no websites, no Twitter, no Facebook, no Instagram, no wokeness, no PC, no MSNBC, no Fox, no CNN and no streaming smart phones, just one short newscast on one of your three channels and a reliable newspaper. We just didn’t know how good we had it. I’m sorry, what’s that you say? Google? Nope, a google was a funny face you made at the little girl in the desk behind you. Back in the day, we had something called libraries. Those are places where many books are kept, and books are things with many, many pages and lots of good, factual information and valuable, entertaining stories. It was all free, and still is. There’s one catch, though. You have to learn to read and write and pronounce words correctly to be part of the literate world. But that’s free also, and it comes in real handy when you actually have to get out there and start talking to real folks and communicating your thoughts in the real world.

Nowadays, the people in the ”advanced”countries of the world are drowning in a cascading flood of information. Most of that “cascade” is totally useless and does nothing but wash away the time and energy you should be devoting to other things that really matter. Recently, we have learned of the latest and greatest thing on the information horizon: Artificial Intelligence. Proclaimed as the reordering of the world’s total sum of collected information, AI is beginning to catch a little heat for having somewhat of a dark side. It now seems that everything from job resumes to counterfeit software to fake medical prescriptions and campaign meddling by foreign countries, and who knows what else are being manipulated with the help of artificial intelligence. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal told of job applicants at national companies who are hired to work remotely by the AI process without ever speaking to a live human being. AI is exploding among banking, retail and communication companies as a major cost-cutting trick. The problem, however, comes along when the evolving power of artificial intelligence is left to run free without the involvement of human judgement. That can be a serious threat to the basic system of the world’s business. (Just ask the space voyagers on board with HAL- 9000, (the evil computer who thought he was a person.) Also causing concern is the prediction that the demand and the cost of power required to support the massive computing infrastructure of AI will soon outpace anything we have ever seen before.

There is an old saying that reminds us that too much information can be a bad thing. While it may be a little too early to totally condemn AI or any of the other advancements of this “brave new world”, it is definitely not too early to require that our government makes sure that the “human factor” be firmly in place as a dominant and absolute piece of the planning, regulation and administration of artificial intelligence. The advent of the Internet has shown us that the future will produce changes we cannot always imagine, predict or prefer. Unfortunately, we can’t recreate the simpler world of 1960, but we can still rely on the standards that have gotten us this far. It might be simplification of the issue, but the authenticity of human intelligence still gives me much more faith in the future than anything artificial.

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