Bob Schwartz

Bougainvillea Breezed By

A bract from a Bougainvillea breezed by me and stopped. Desert dry and delicate it waited for another breeze or me to carry it away with care.

We mistake the “AI race”. Usually we talk about how fast AI is being developed and how broadly it is being deployed and applied. Pretty fast and broadly—exponentially so.

At least half of our consideration should be on—I will be detailing the term that I avoid and must define—how much “stupider” we are allowing ourselves to get.

The race is between us and AI. It is conceivable that even if we freeze everything right now, we are behind with diminishing chance of catching up.

Now about “stupid”. It is rightly considered a harsh term. It may not reduce the harsh edge to say that what I mean is a lessened level of pertinent personal knowledge and a diminished ability to think things through completely.

By pertinent knowledge, I mean knowing what we need to know to lead lives comprehensively. To put it a different way, just knowing “stuff” and hearing about “stuff” and talking about “stuff” and thinking about “stuff” can be entertaining and time-occupying, and in balanced measure might be satisfying. But media and commercial culture insists that all kinds of “stuff” is important or essential to know. Which much of it isn’t.

By thinking things through completely, I mean what is often referred to as “critical thinking”, so often that is has become an ignorable cliché. It shouldn’t be ignored. There is more than one way to think about things. But all of those ways require thinking about things. Partial thinking, not thinking through completely, leads to not reaching goals and solving situations optimally or at all. Maybe we are lucky, or maybe someone assures us that that goals and solutions are possible—certain—if we just listen to and follow them. Relax and think about that other “stuff”.

Back to the race.

AI can know things for us, already does. AI can think things through more or less completely for us, already does (or claims to). When we give up on knowing what is essential and knowing those essentials ourselves, when we give up on thinking things through completely, we are behind AI and losing ground.

So we should get smarter and think harder. That may not put us ahead, but at least we will not get farther behind. For now.

“We’re like people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink. And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”
Professor Marci Shore

We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the U.S.
New York Times
By Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley

Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley, all professors at Yale and experts in authoritarianism, explain why America is especially vulnerable to a democratic backsliding — and why they are leaving the United States to take up positions at the University of Toronto.

Professor Stanley is leaving the United States as an act of protest against the Trump administration’s attacks on civil liberties. “I want Americans to realize that this is a democratic emergency,” he said.

Professor Shore, who has spent two decades writing about the history of authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe, is leaving because of what she sees as the sharp regression of American democracy. “We’re like people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink,” she said. “And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”

Professor Snyder’s reasons are more complicated. Primarily, he’s leaving to support his wife, Professor Shore, and their children, and to teach at a large public university in Toronto, a place he says can host conversations about freedom. At the same time, he shares the concerns expressed by his colleagues and worries that those kinds of conversations will become ever harder to have in the United States.

I have written about Timothy Snyder a number of times before, starting here. As the piece says, he and his colleagues are experts on fascism.

If you are able to read and watch the extended New York Times piece and video, you will find over 1,000 comments to which the professors reply. The comments raise important questions, including the issue of whether it would be better for them to stay and fight the fight, rather than leaving the country. Another question is why they are doing this now, rather than protesting—if this is a protest—sooner.

That last matter is easily answered. They have been studying the issue for their careers, and have been highlighting it in America for a long time. If you were an expert on this and had been pleading for more people to pay attention and do something, how much longer would you be willing to stay and fight, when the foreseeable reality came to pass?

Just because they are in Toronto and not America, their work will continue to enlighten anyone anywhere who is listening. As in so many areas, and not for the last time, America’s loss is Canada’s gain. Again.

If you were reading the TV Guide for the Week of August 26, 1961 you would see two ads from Better Homes and Gardens magazine:

Best Home Ideas of 1961
The editors of Better Homes and Gardens scour the country to give you the best in 1961 house plans and ideas. See them in the September issue.

and

How Your Family Can Fight Communism
Learn what you are battling to save, how you and your children can save it—read the September issue of Better Homes and Gardens.

This is not to say that having a better home and fighting Communism were the only concerns of Americans in August 1961. But they were high on the list.

Does that seem strange more than sixty years later? Is it surprising that the hopes and fears of some—many?—Americans haven’t changed that much, minus the hammer and sickle?

The second ad promises that you will “Learn what you are battling to save” as if maybe readers weren’t sure what they were fighting for. What are you battling to save?

Philip K. Dick (PKD) was a genius and visionary creative. Nobody’s mind is like anybody else’s, but his was more unlike than most. He had worlds in his mind that were like this one but were not at the same time. It is why so many of his books and stories became groundbreaking movies and why he was by some standards not standard.

The Man in the High Castle, original novel and extended TV expansion, is about history “as it happened” and history “as it might otherwise be”. Sometimes this is called alternative or counterfactual history. What if _? In this case, what if Germany and Japan had won World War II?

Except at the same time that Germany and Japan won World War II they lost World War II. Despite substantial real-life evidence that they won the war and control the world, there are films proving that they lost and that the Allies won. Of course, in the world we live in, in the history we know, the Allies did win the war. So why wouldn’t there be films depicting that victory and the Axis defeat?

In the world of The Man in the High Castle, these are just films and not just films. They are acts of imagination just as the novel—all of PKD’s novels, all histories—are acts of imagination.

Can you live in a world of imagination? That is precisely the accusation that PKD’s behavior sometimes elicited, that he was mentally unstable. But he recognized that we live in a world not just of imagination but of constant and immediate change, reflected in his theme of the I Ching in The Man in the High Castle.

If you live in an oppressive world where Hitler won the war but you have reason to believe that you are actually living in a world where Hitler lost the war, are you unrealistic or even crazy? Or is it crazy not to believe in the possibility? To surrender needlessly and prematurely? Is change not only possible but inevitable? Do you need alternative films to prove it?

AI is now infused into everything, or soon will be. That includes consumer products from coffee or shoes to large scale undertakings. How exactly is AI in your coffee, not just involved in the process of growing it and bringing it to your kitchen? Don’t ask. Just be confident that the day is coming when AI will be in everything, or so they say.

I thought about his when I heard that funds have been cut for people who fight fires, especially in a summer when increasingly dangerous wildfires will increase again. Firefighters are generally underpaid relative to their importance, and the money for them is now reduced or gone.

I can imagine the fever dreams of AI true believers who imagine firefighting-drones controlled by AI controllers. No brave or expensive people needed. Or of the powerful but simple-minded leaders these true believers advise. “It will be just like in the movies!”

Except that if that ever happens, it is not anytime soon. But those wildfires are very soon and certain. This is not a movie, except maybe a disaster movie. AI may come to the rescue, but I doubt it.