AI Rebuttal

 

I've asked my friend, the great fantasy novelist, James Kafka, if I could present my argument in defense of artificial intelligence here to his esteemed audience.

 

Greetings Blog Readers,

 

I am a writer who uses artificial intelligence. Please unclutch your pearls, I do not seek to play the devil's advocate or gaslight you with my optimism on this dangerous new technology. Rather, I want to share my experience as a child of the 1980s, so that you can see how this inevitable new era of writing inspires my wonder.

 

The sound of the keyboard the first time I typed my name, long before I started school, clicked and clicked with importance. It sounded like hope. I wasn't old enough to write my name yet. But as I played the Oregon Trail game, I imagined my ancestors forging rivers, marrying the natives, and finally settling in the Willamette River Valley. Games were like a story and I was the main character.

 

We still fought and played outside, but when the doors opened to the back room where the retired monitors sat collecting dust, it was as if the C Prompt were the keys to the dungeon and a horde of gold lay only a few clicks away.

 

Computers promised a portal to magic. Books also led us through adventures to new worlds, but they didn't lead directly to another soul. As I reached adulthood, the Internet entered every home. I abandoned a town of eighty people to embrace the world right when I came of age.

 

When I fell in love with a popular television series, fan fiction extended it indefinitely. If a book from an indie author changed my life, I could email him and express my boundless gratitude. Everyone in my life may have relocated, but no one ever left. As the member of a generation defined by being forgotten latch key kids, technology was the tether to lifelong friends. All community resources were a click away.

 

As a grandmother now, I don't disconnect from the digital world. I keep my Fitbit on my wrist and my phone in my pocket when I hike. Instead, I set my device to “Do Not Disturb” in my home whenever I feel like it. I disconnect when and where I want, because it's not tech that burns you out. It's the people on the other end. The ads. The disinformation. The propaganda. The divisive rhetoric. The horror of the over-evolved chimps downing energy drinks and beating their chests...

 

But I understand luddites. I was raised by two back-to-earth hippies who shunned everything with a button. I know artificial intelligence spooks people. We can't predict how it will be used or who will drop it on their enemy like a nuclear bomb. Over the years, we've seen the worst of human nature at www-dot-something-really-dark-and-scary-dot-com. If a bit of that slips into a psychopathic server with quantum processing speeds, surely, we'll all wake up in the netherworld tomorrow?

 

No, not really, but we are experiencing what it must have been like when the first ape brought home a burning branch ready to cook their food. And while I love fiddling with Chatgpt, it has no soul. It mimics life. It has no life of its own. It sounds exactly like us, but so does a mockingbird.

 

We aren't on the precipice of discovering a new form of life, but I think we are looking for the first time at how a mind operates without a soul. We're about to discover that things we can't measure, things we dismiss as supernatural or spiritual, are real. We're learning more about what makes us human.

I'm okay with that. If AI runs loose like a virus, people will direct a hoard of AI after it to contain and hospitalize the afflicted. If it's made into a weapon, it will be used for defense. Where there is bad, there is good, and vice versa. The real threat comes from within us and what matters is the balance between the forces of creation and destruction. As natural innovators, we're a curious species–always fighting against the same forces, engaged in the same battle against ourselves.

 

Carrie Bailey Allen writes as OA Allen and edits The Handbook of The Writer Secret Society (https://peevishpenman.com/pages/wss-handbook). She's currently obsessed with researching ancient alchemy (www.vermontpurealchemy.com) and she's still furious about what James Kafka let happen to Tark, in his first book, Vanguard.

My associates are not as open as I about allowing opposing opinions.

                             Thank you Carrie Bailey Allen