A Coming Catastrophe

Forgive me, but I am pondering doom lately. Yesterday, I had an Op-ed on climate change published on cleveland.com. Today, a different form of potential obliteration is occupying my thoughts.

I recently watched an interview in which Meryl Streep explained that her finely honed sense of empathy is the secret sauce that helps her to connect with roles. No amount of craft or intellectualizing replaces empathy in turning in sterling performances. Her best ones resonate with emotional truth. 

That made me think about AI and what it can and cannot do. Whatever its applications and implications, AI is on no path to reproducing humans’ capacity to feel, listen, and speak emotional truth. 

Paul McCartney’s plan to resurrect John Lennon through AI for one last Beatles song seems all wrong to me. They can get the pitch of Lennon’s voice, but what of the feeling, the sense of time and place, that infused the Beatles' catalog? How does AI reproduce the McCartney acid trip that contributed to Sergeant Pepper, or the sense of dissolution that precipitated Let It Be?

This began as a silly little post postulating that AI might help me seem like I remember long-forgotten books and produce new blog posts without effort. 

But this topic took a pitch-black turn when the mainstream media started reporting that AI’s ascent was “dangerous and devastating” to humanity. Now experts are warning that AI will lead to our “extinction.”

Let that sink in a moment. Computers now vie with climate change, pandemics, and nuclear annihilation as the world's deadliest forces.

A couple of months ago, AI insiders begged Congress to regulate their own industry immediately as its rapid ascent was “a risk to humanity.” “My worst fear,” warned ChatGPT CEO Sam Altman, “is that “we cause significant harm to the world.”

In May, the National Eating Disorders Association eliminated its human helpline and pivoted to chatbots. This move -- in health care, of all sectors -- seems an unbelievably cruel harbinger of our coming isolation.

Prescient, my husband Joe has been warning me of this coming catastrophe for some time now. I told him he had seen too many movies and dismissed his declarations as histrionics and hyperbole -- until I started regularly hearing the same thing in the mainstream media. Joe’s matter-of-fact AI-doomsaying has become a leitmotif in our relationship. He is normally quite cheerful.

It does not help that the doomsters are using generalities to describe the coming apocalypse. Many struggle with understanding just what AI is and what an AI-determined future looks like. 

Being told we are doomed without a snapshot of what the doom looks like keeps these scenarios at bay -- vague and distant. NBC’s technology correspondent warned of AI muddying the waters of the 2024 presidential election. Other experts are talking about a Terminator scenario where robots seek to extinguish the human race. 

Bill Gates recently told Good Morning America that we cannot back away from AI because there will always be good actors and bad actors in this arena, and the good guys need to keep on top of the technology. 

We may not yet know what the doom looks like, but we have been warned that it’s coming. To survive, we need more Meryl Streeps and no bad actors.