A Boomer’s Take on Artificial Intelligence
First, let me start by stating — like most of my generation — I’m a late adopter to technology. Instead of A.I. as a study aid, we had Cliff & Spark Notes. In place of social media, like Instagram and Tik Tok, we passed around notebooks in school so our friends could respond with some snarky comment or gossip. For most of us, we thought algorithms had something to do with algebra and slide rules and we wanted nothing to do with them. The tools we used most to communicate and create were in-person conversations with each other, word play, and childhood games.
For me, T.V., transistor radios, and portable stereos changed my attitude as a young teen about technology. These were entertainment devices that I adopted which opened-up my world. I still wrote poetry and entries in my diaries. My first album was Meet the Beatles. The first live concert I attended at the age of 14 was The Beatles in their first American Tour in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1964. Bob Dylan, The Byrds, and folk rock followed. I loved libraries, books, and reading. My favorite genre as a preteen was science fiction and fantasy. Later, I read novels about dystopian futures. As an adult and a cinephile, I loved film adaptations of my favorite writers who warned us of the future.
Now, before I go any further, full disclosure, I have adopted technology and use laptops, computer workstations, smart phones, the internet, apps to check spelling and more, and search engines like Google, all timesaving tools that aid my life.
For those of you who may be wondering why I express some lack of trust, fear, or anxiety about artificial intelligence, it’s simple. Until I learn a new skill and become proficient at it, I want to understand it fully, it’s ramifications and potential consequences, how to use it responsibly, to protect my privacy and boundaries, without harming myself or others. Lastly, I don’t wish to tacitly give away my personal power and ability to make my own choices that align with my values.
Let’s delve into the roots of my fears about Artificial Intelligence.
“Be afraid, be very afraid.”
This is a quote from the film, The Fly, directed by David Cronenberg and starring Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis, who were husband and wife. It was a sci-fi story about time travel and technology that went dangerously awry.
Books
Growing up, unlike many preteen girls, instead of reading romance and Nancy Drew novels, I read science fiction, fantasy, and books about future dystopian societies, and continued to read them as a young adult. Here’s a sampling of authors and their books:
- Ray Bradbury: The Illustrated Man, Fahrenheit 451, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Martian Chronicles
- George Orwell: 1984, Animal Farm
- Aldous Huxley: Brave New World
- Phillip K. Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
- Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness
- F. Skinner: Walden Two
- Margaret Atwood: A Handmaid’s Tale
- Ira Levin: The Stepford Wives
And the list goes on…
Now, in a hat tip to technology, when books are adapted into screenplays for T.V. and the movie screen, our senses are enhanced by the visual imagery and auditory sound. Let’s look at some of these books and other stories made into movies and teleplays featuring the most harrowing futures and villains.
Films
A.I. Villains
From the film, “2001: A Space Odyssey
- Metropolis: This 1927 film featured an early robot villain, Maria’s double.
- 2001: A Space Odessey: Introduced us to the first 20th century A.I. villain, HAL, the artificial intelligence robot intended to assist man and navigate the ship.
- Blade Runner & Blade Runner 2049: In the future society, we were faced with evil adversaries, the Replicants.
- Alien & Its Sequels and Prequel: In addition to battling the Xenomorphs, we needed to disarm or reprogram the A.I. android robots, Ash, David, and Mother, the navigation system from the original Alien.
- Ex Machina: Caleb, a programmer at a huge Internet company has been chosen to be the human component in a Turing test to determine the capabilities and consciousness of Ava a beautiful robot.
- Westworld, I Robot, Stepford Wives, and the list goes on.
Even films for children Wall-E, and futuristic dating apps, her, turn against the protagonists.
Technology & Authoritarian Threats
- The Illustrated Man: The Veldt. Note: reprinted and edited from Spark Notes. Spoiler Alert: “In the story, the Hadleys live a life of leisure in a fully automated house called “The Happylife Home”. Parents George and Lydia become concerned by their children Peter and Wendy’s fascination with their “nursery”, a virtual reality room that can recreate any desired scenario and allow them to live within it. George and Lydia are so concerned by their children’s obsession for the “nursery”, which has become stuck on the African Veldt setting, complete with prowling lions, that they call in a psychologist, David. David advises them to shut down the Happylife Home and live self-sufficiently. Just before George and Lydia can take this advice, Peter and Wendy lure them into the Veldt one last time. Later, David discovers Peter and Wendy placidly eating their lunch on the virtual Veldt as the lions consume the remains of their parents.”
- Fahrenheit 451: From Wikipedia, “Fahrenheit 451 is a 1953 dystopian novel by American writer Ray Bradbury. It presents a future American society where books have been outlawed and “firemen” burn any that are found. The novel follows in the viewpoint of Guy Montag, a fireman who soon becomes disillusioned with his role of censoring literature and destroying knowledge, eventually quitting his job and committing himself to the preservation of literary and cultural writings. Fahrenheit 451 was written by Bradbury during the Second Red Scare and the McCarthy era, inspired by the book burnings in Nazi Germany and by ideological repression in the Soviet Union.] Bradbury’s claimed motivation for writing the novel has changed multiple times. In a 1956 radio interview, Bradbury said that he wrote the book because of his concerns about the threat of burning books in the United States. In later years, he described the book as a commentary on how mass media reduces interest in reading literature. In a 1994 interview, Bradbury cited political correctness as an allegory for the censorship in the book, calling it “the real enemy these days” and labelling it as “thought control and freedom of speech”
Documentary Film Warnings
The following documentary films chart the history and development of artificial intelligence and pose how these tools can help us, or in the end, control or destroy us. Oh, My! See links at the end of this essay to view these documentaries.
- Coded Bias
- Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World
- iHuman
- A.I. Revolution
- In the Age of AI
- AI Tipping Point
What Does This All Mean?
“What, me worry?” Is the catch phrase of Mad Magazine’s, imaginary character, Alfred E. Neuman. When reading the satire and comic genius of the magazine growing up, the answer for most boomers, was no, I’m not worried, until it quickly changed after the proliferation of nuclear weapons, fallout shelters, duck and cover civil defense drills, the Kennedy assassination and the list goes on.
Television like The Twilight Zone, and Outer Limits, played on that paranoia and dis-ease. Some of the most popular films of the 1960’s and continuing today, ask the questions we are afraid to answer.
Humans are now at a crossroads — we now need to worry whether the tools like A.I. which we’ve created to assist us — now in the end — may be our final undoing.
Related Reading from Mixed Metaphors, Oh My!
My Love/Hate Relationship with Technology
Three Things I Don’t Need (or, Want)
Fast Forward Through the Looking-Glass
Because Love (Review of the film her)
Additional Documentary Viewing on the Topic
Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World
Additional Reading on the Topic
How Stories About Human-Robot Relationships Pushes Our Buttons