By Joe Berk
I’m all for intelligence (most folks would agree there’s too little of it), but I’m scared to death of artificial intelligence.
Turn the clock back 60 years. I’m a kid working in a farm and garden center and the boss (John Bocchieri, who was a neighbor and a nice guy) put me on the cash register after I’d been there about a week. The first time I rang up a sale the customer handed me a $5 bill and I had to make change. Mr. Bocchieri saw my dilemma and he told me how to do it. “You just take the amount, take money out of the drawer, and while doing so count up to what the customer gave you. That will be the right amount.” That little secret made life a lot easier for me. It even worked if the customer gave you a little more in change (you know, so you could give them back only paper money).
Today, the electronic cash registers try to make it even easier, but all they did was just screw things up. Kids will ring up a sale, the customer gives them, say, a $20 bill, the kid enters the $20, and the cash register tells them how much change to give back. If that feature isn’t working, I’ve often had clerks mentally lock up when they have to determine how much they should return. I first started seeing this during the Bush administration. (Whenever it happens, the phrase “No Child Left Behind” pops into my mind.) Relying on the cash register to determine how much change to return robbed clerks of their ability to think. Give a clerk a little extra to get paper money back (you know, say the price is $11.79 so you give the cash register jockey $20 and 79 cents), and it really throws them into overload mode.
I ran into this same phenomenon of machines doing peoples’ thinking for them in my manufacturing days. In the old days, production planning involved what the job title implied: The ability to plan a production operation. Production planners (or schedulers, as we sometimes called them) were people who knew the required manufacturing delivery dates, the manufacturing times, and the supplier component lead times. With that information, they determined what we needed from suppliers and when we had to order it, and what had to happen (and when it had to happen) in the factory to deliver product on time. We usually did just that: We delivered on time. When things didn’t go as planned in one or more of the work centers (as often happens in the manufacturing world) or if a supplier was late (another common occurrence), the production planners could develop workarounds and our products still shipped on time.
Then an evil computer program called MRP (Manufacturing Requirements Planning) came on the scene. It was software that required as inputs the info described above. The idea was that it would simplify production planning. But a funny thing happened. Over the course of a few years, the skilled production planners who could actually plan workflows through a factory retired and they were replaced with folks who were essentially data entry clerks. These folks were still called production planners, but they couldn’t plan a trip to the bathroom. The really bad thing about MRP is that it assumed everything in the factory and our deliveries from suppliers happened on time (and as anyone knows who has ever worked in a factory, it never does). When production hiccups occurred, MRP was useless and so were our so-called production planners. I guess I shouldn’t complain. I was a manufacturing consultant specializing in helping companies that couldn’t deliver on time. I made a ton of money thanks to MRP’s inadequacies and the managers who thought it was the answer to all their problems.
Another form of this disease comes in the flavor of nav systems. You know, the things driven by global positioning systems that ask for a destination and then tell you how to get there.
Don’t get me wrong: I love these nav systems. But when I use them (which is nearly all the time anymore), I lose the sense of where I am, where I’m going, and how to get there. I don’t have to think. I just listen to what Waze (or whatever program I’m using) tells me to do and I do it. I’ll tell you how bad it is: I’ve almost driven through stop signs and red lights listening to my nav system. And I secretly sort of know, deep down, that if I didn’t have the nav system, I would not know how to get to places I know that I know how to get to. If that sentence gives you trouble, read it again; I wrote it and I know it’s tough to follow. But it conveys what I’m trying to say. Maybe AI would do a better job writing it, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to ask it to. Writing is one of the few things I have left.
Ever been embarrassed by the autocorrect feature when you write something on your cell phone or your computer? I find it highly annoying, and my experience is that it makes as many mistakes (by auto”correcting” to a word I didn’t want to use) as it fixes. It’s a feature that’s teaching us it’s okay to not pay attention to our spelling. Maybe some people need it. Those people shouldn’t be posting comments. We are already a nation bordering on illiteracy. We don’t need help to speed us along.
Now the talk is all about artificial intelligence and where it can take us. Self-driving cars. Diagnostics software for medical doctors. Social media algorithms. Nuclear weapons control. Chatbots. Blog articles. Think about what these programs will do. They’ll degrade doctors’ ability to make diagnoses themselves. They’ll eliminate the need for drivers to drive an automobile. They’ll decide what violates “community standards” and take down posts (they are already doing this and no one likes it). They’ll decide when to launch a nuclear attack. Can you believe this is being seriously discussed? What could go wrong? Think about chatbots or the automated questions you get when trying to reach a human being on the phone. Have you ever come away from one of these encounters thinking “gee, those folks really made it easy for me?” I don’t think so.
How about AI-generated writing? I get three or four email inquiries a week from services that want to pay me to allow their blog content here on ExNotes. When I asked to see what they could do (back before I realized what they were doing), the content was awful. Thanks, but no thanks.
Nope, you can keep your AI. What’s lacking in the world is not enough plain old real intelligence, and AI will only make that worse. We need more intelligence. The real kind, not the artificial kind.
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“And I secretly sort of know, deep down, that if I didn’t have the nav system, I would not know how to get to places I know that I know how to get to.” Well said, Joe.
When I travel, I still like to look at maps of where I’m going beforehand, and consider alternate routes should problems arise – which they frequently do.
Thanks for an interesting and informative ongoing blog.
Lowell
You bet. And you can also bet that it will never be AI-generated.
Well I do mostly agree. It started with fuel injection and even manual advance. Whenever people don’t have to do what they always did .
You can blame remote controls anything. Bluetooth . Adding machines.
AI is a threat to humanity . But not the technology itself. It’s the humans in charge of it . Applying it .programming it. Look how the irs , dept of justice , EPA , the US military leadership and other government agencies have used their own versions of AI to corrupt the constitution.
I think it is time to watch the movie, Terminator, again.
Is that a knock on Ahh-nold?
I will stick with Pumping Iron .
Perhaps he never should have got past Conan! Or his kids nanny.
Arnold is the real deal. A lot of folks thought he was a good Governator. I’m one of them.
I agree,Realtors find it to be a huge time saver when writing up a listing.There may be a time and place for it.
For real estate listings? I mean, how hard could it be?
Depends on the writers human intelligence level . Which has sorely been lacking .
Ain’t that the truth.
IMO, there is a reason for this that is dark… people raised without common sense – dependent on A.I…. can be controlled.
You might be on to something, Lance.
Was my response generated by AI?
I have no more than one dollar in coins to my name at any time. There’s no five gallon jug filled with $975 bucks in coins that I’ll pay a Coinstar machine 12% just to get paper. I manage that on a daily basis. And yes, I’m the guy in line totally confusing the young cashier either to get paper or getting rid of my four or sometimes five pennies. And when their brain finally locks up I tell them exactly how much change to give me. Then I do this, and the more people standing in line behind me the better. It only takes ten seconds…. I hold open my hand and show them the roughly 45 cents in coins… Then I brag about “this is the only change I have to my name”… Then I say “You know that five gallon spring water bottle you have full of coins?” , which they always answer “yes”… I tell them I don’t have one, this is all I have… They smile approvingly…. But then I go on to say (and this is the best part. Try it!) with the straightest face possible, I say… “Well I’m retired and this is my hobby… I manage my change for something to do.” Their smiling, approving face suddenly turns to sadness. I love it, LOL. It’s something Larry David could have used in “Curb Your Enthusiasm”. It gives them a story to tell their friends. Try it Joe. Report back.
Spare change takes on a whole new meeting…
Yea , the guy in line trying to buy 46 cents worth of candy for 45 cents.
And one wonders why check out rage has supplanted road rage ! (Except perhaps in Idaho )
I saw a TV show on PBS that was about AI and it was VERY enlightening to say the least. The future does not look bright for us. I read where a robot committed suicide by falling down some stairs. I don’t know if this was a lighthearted joke or something that was real.
I guess that robot will never get to robot heaven.
No but he will make to EBay parts listings.
I still use paper maps…when I can find them. Thing is, I can see where this is headed and it’s a real nightmare duct taped to paradise. We create a mind that can do whatever we can do, but better and faster, MUCH faster, and pretty soon it will do those things and we won’t. Not only will we not be doing those things we used to do, we will forget how. On the other hand, nearly every facet of Human existence (except those little things like self reliance, autonomy and freedom, personal growth through effort) will improve beyond measure: medical diagnosis and treatment without error, think about THAT, a pilot that didn’t just pull an all nighter because he fought with his wife, a car that doesn’t fall asleep at the wheel or need more than a millisecond to make a life saving maneuver. And on and on.
Of course, there is the flip side; the AI that doesn’t answer to anything but another AI, whole generations that don’t get up off the couch, ever. The ability of our government to surveil and control everyone, everywhere all the time.
And there is nothing we can do to stop AI from coming. Genies just don’t fit back in the bottle. They are like sleeping bags that you buy new, take out of the sack they came in and never roll up small enough to go back in. I mean, if we don’t get AI, the Chinese will, right? Or so the argument goes and they may have a point.
And I actually use AI chat bots to find things out. Damned useful for certain things. I have a lot of interests and these programs turn years of stumbling around trying to figure something out into weeks and generally do a better job of curating information. Which leads to another problem: as long as it’s being honest and plays the same game you want to, well and good. But what if its job isn’t to inform you, but to lead you further from the truth? How would you know? Anybody in control of these things, if anyone can control them in the end, is going to have more power than anyone should. There is precisely zero chance that kind of power will not be abused. I just don’t have any answers…but let me go check Chatgpt and see what it comes up with…
An awesome reply. Thanks for a well thought out, well written response.
AI must stop generating those fake videos of Joe Biden, he won the debate, the border is secure, there is no inflation and there is no crime in America ! LOL
John, I hope they keep Biden as the nominee. Think about it.
I totally agree. I wish both the republicans and RFK jr would leave him be. I mean there is artificial intelligence and then there is a lack of intelligence. Biden himself has proven one doesn’t have to be a robot to fall down stairs .
Is it coincidental that a pop-up ad for this blog is advertising AI stock? LOL
Buy Yoo-Hoo (Mott’s is the parent company) instead. Yoo-Hoo will not try to take over your mind…..just your diet.
I will check Mott out. Thanks, Fred.
Mott the Hoople?
We all need to read Orson Wells 1984 again I think it is.
I’m sure the antichrist 666 guy will find AI very useful.
I Agree with all the comments above.
Sometimes I find myself talking with people that make you wonder what planet they are from cause they are on a totally different thought train …….. wreck.
Great article Joe.
Thanks, Rob.
“Give a clerk a little extra to get paper money back (you know, say the price is $11.79 so you give the cash register jockey $20 and 79 cents), and it really throws them into overload mode.” I’m not surprised they go into overload, given that’s going to stiff them into giving you a $10 note for change when you only paid $9 over the price!! Unless you meant you’d take a $5 note and 4x $1 coins, of course….
I hadn’t considered that. I think if it happened, I would tell the clerk he gave me back too much change, which sometimes happens.