Poopy rhetoric

Googling stuff left and right has been a thing for a while now. I’ve never indulged much because I type too slow. I also tend to forget what I was going to ask when the cursor is finally in the search bar. I’ve never been particularly curious nor good at asking questions. I also know googling stuff left and right is just not a way to live this life. Now there’s AI.

And good speech to text! The great brain toilet flush. A notoriously unhelpful tool for actual thinking. It does the job for you, the trimming, sorting, rehashing, even storage. If one had to stare at their thoughts and questions piling up, they’d engage in a different kind of thinking. Because they’d be dealing with the raw material. When I close my eyes long enough and stare at mine, I get the importance of the ability to letting most of them go.

My American-college-educated wife gives me a great window into the normative expectations when it comes to how one should express thoughts. I should be clear, concise, and heavily favor rationality. To me nothing is either clear or concise. I’m going to have fun watching her deal with our children.

My toddler is in his “poopy” phase. Everything is poop. He asks a lot of silly questions. We have to answer, some. Extrapolation is necessary to not be stuck in poop, trains or legos. That process is messy, non-linear, cryptic….

A worldview is an osmotic process, not a connect the dots puzzle (I’m sad for those who think it is). When AI connects the dots for us, we obviously lose the chance for osmosis. My brain activity consistently drops proportionally to the amount of external support it receives. Knowing I have this conundrum in my pocket requires some extra discipline. A real bummer for me running already low on it.

At this point I’m ambivalent about AI. I want to avoid avoids both Luddism and moral panic. But efficiency can be violence, a sort of gentle coercion via convenience. It can be very helpful. Just like cars made us less mobile by moving us easily. It’s quite a simple dilemma.

I don’t like cars, nor AI, but I use both pragmatically. I agree on the base value and severely judge the cost. As always, the public’s enthusiasm will pay for sophistication and cost will creep up. The commons will always be an ideological struggle, if one even believes in their necessity in the first place. Today is different than yesterday, and will be different from tomorrow. AI or not. Machines are not human. How helpful is that observation. Is one better than the other? Shit’s going to happen anyway?

According to today’s optimist, there’s no major problem. We should simply outsource pragmatic reasoning tasks to machines and be thankful for the time and energy it gives back for stuff like… poetry.

Techno optimists like to throw around metaphors to reassure that it simply extends human agency without replacing it. It’s not better or worse, just different.

• How hard does a grenade punch?
• Do calculators know maths?
• Do spell-checkers know grammar?
• Does a piano know music?
• Saying AI can think is like saying boats can swim

The rhetoric of a new age, or truly a step function change in human cognition? I think the question is revealing.