From a Google Image Search - Blade Runner - CinemAbysmal
To the Nerds,
We love you and are awestruck at your tech skills, but you are getting on our last nerve. Every time your big brains offer us the next new thing it is immediately the darling of all nerds. Going slow to take time to adapt to this innovation becomes impossible. What makes the pressure to use new technologies so powerful? How does this new thing become instantly the state of the art and force those who can't grasp it right away to go and buy the next "**** For Dummies" book, in this case, “AI for Dummies”?
Oppenheimer was the perfect book/movie to arrive at this moment. The United States was in a race to produce a nuclear bomb before Germany could, knowing that Germany would surely use such a weapon to hold the world hostage. The goal was so important that the army overlooked known connections scientists had with Communism. Communism was a new idea at the time and what communism would be like as a form of government was unknown, although the world was learning. Oppenheimer was a humanist, not a Communist. He gave money for causes backed by the Communist Party, like the Spanish Civil War, but he never joined. Before he made the bomb no one particularly cared about his leftist ideas, but after the bomb was built and successfully and horrifically used in Japan, Lewis Strauss, a member of the Atomic Energy Commission accused Oppenheimer of being a communist and implied that he was a traitor. Oppenheimer, still stunned by the guilt he felt over the implications of using the atomic bomb in Japan said, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds," a line from the Bhagavad Gita.
The point of this little digression should be clear to nerds who understand the dual nature of all that humans do or create; the reason most religions have a version of the Garden of Eden story. That AI is useful to businesses and academics is the positive side of things. The internet is going nuts over the potential of AI to save hours of productive human time now spent on record-keeping and the kinds of secretarial and HR tasks that must be done if a business is to thrive. The arrival of word processors and spreadsheets and the whole Microsoft Office suite ended those storied Mad Men days when every office had a secretary and maybe a stenographer and a pool of typists. Secretaries still exist but not everyone gets to have one. Often, they operate independently as Personal Assistants.
Artificial intelligence was first invented in fiction. Science fiction often foretells future trends in societies. Authors of science fiction imagined both sides of AI, the usefulness, and the ways the tech could be abused; how AI would help mankind, and its potential to hurt mankind. Once an idea is hatched and catches popular attention, geeks believe that they have received a new assignment from the universe and that they must complete it, or it will keep them awake at night. You are our twenty-first-century Oppenheimers. Sci-fi writers warned us that AI had the same possibilities for good and evil as any other technology.
The Large Language Model is particularly ripe for abuse. The fact that it exists at all abuses our legal protections for creators of art in all forms, written, graphic/painting/photography, and music. It is the one aspect of AI that must be discussed and reevaluated. It works. Now that we know it works, we need to figure out how people will be paid for the work that was gobbled up by algorithms to produce the LLM. We should find nerds, philosophers, artists, and law experts meeting regularly, perhaps in a new AI think tank to discuss payments, regulations, limitations, and philosophical questions. This technology has indeed taken us by surprise. Its success is premature. I do not say the word nerd with derision. I love the nerds of the world. But there will be negative consequences if this tech has an unethical beginning. Please fix this.