Imagine if a bunch
of billionaires and large corporations got together and tried to push
a shiny Black Box on the world. It would require that electricity
production be doubled. It would take 20% of fresh water. The
positive claims for it are that it would reduce work loads for
humans. It would be inventive, smart, and powerful. And that’s
all you know about the Black Box. Would you buy it?
This is AI, or the
new Artificial Intelligence. It’s promoted as a sort of
one-size-fits-all panacea for mankind. AI is training the Black Box
to think more like a human, but still only being a Black Box that is
limited to the data it is fed. The selling point is that AI can then
replace humans in jobs.
“We
believe that it is possible that deep learning systems are less than
a decade away from superintelligence,” Pachocki added. He described
superintelligence as systems smarter than humans across a large
number of critical actions.
[https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/28/sam-altman-says-openai-will-have-a-legitimate-ai-researcher-by-2028/]
Is there a need for
AI? Do we need to replace humans in jobs? Are there down sides to
the Black Box? Take for example a newly graduated student. He needs
to make a resume. So he asks the Black Box to make him a resume
after feeding it bits and pieces that need to be put together to
impress a company enough to hire him. The AI quickly spits out an
impressive looking resume, and off it goes to several companies.
These companies are swamped with impressive looking AI-generated
resumes, so it uses AI to process them and pick the best candidates
for each job. Is this an improvement of some sort thanks to the
Black Box? No. The resume does not represent the actual human. The
companies are using the Black Box to decide which human is best to
work in a human job. The Black Box only knows data. It does not
know people.
Certainly there are
good uses for AI, perhaps in the military to replace a human that
would be in a dangerous situation. AI can look through data faster
than a human, so looking for a medicine to fit a particular disease
could be speeded up. But that is not how AI is being sold. It is
being sold as a universal panacea. Its goal is to replace people
with a more intelligent, capable employee that doesn’t need to be
paid. This is why the corporations and billionaires are so excited
about AI.
But there are many
down sides to replacing humans. AI is not human. It does not know
what unemployment is like, for instance. It does not know human to
human interaction. It is an attempt to make humans unnecessary.
“The promise of automation was to do the mundane so human
creativity can flourish. Instead human creativity is demeaned as
mundane so Big Tech’s machines can flourish.” [Thinking Like a
Human,, by David Weitzner, p. 114]
Do we need a Black
Box that sucks up half of our electricity and 20% of our water? Are
the promoters of the Black Box pushing it for personal benefit
instead of societal improvement? These are things that need to be
considered and thought through before we just give in to all the
hype.
