People worldwide are fretting about the development of Artificial Intelligence. I’m not one of them. Worrying about AI makes as much sense as Stephen Curry’s worrying about facing Shaquille O’Neal in a 3-point shooting contest. It doesn’t do what they say it does, and I doubt it ever will. And I’m someone whose written several novels that include true Artificial Intelligences.

I’m just not buying the hype.

Much of what is being touted as AI is actually just the culmination of decades of ordinary software development. How do I know? I worked in the high tech industry for over three decades. We were doing speech recognition in the 1980s. We were doing large language modeling in the 1990s. None of this crap is new. There is more intelligence in a hummingbird’s ability to recognize the face of a woman who leaves them nectar than there is in AI. I’m not expecting anyone to believe me, and frankly, I don’t give a shit if you don’t. I’m just writing this here so I can say, “I told you so,” later.

1. Companies are building tons of data centers that WILL NEVER BE USED. Many won’t be completed. Why? Because almost all AI that people use will run on local Large Language Models (LLMs) that run on their computers. RAM and storage prices will continue to soar, until they don’t.
2. The more people become familiar with AI, the less they will like it.
3. Much of what is being touted as revolutionary AI is just code that’s been in development and available since the 1970s. Algorithms aren’t AI. LLMs are the results of teaching computers how to parse human speech. I saw some in the 1980s and worked with PhDs who were doing this in the early 1990s. Not only is it not new and not intelligence, it’s just an automated way to have a computer read a script instead of paying people pittances to do it. Meh.
4. Much AI is being developed by people with lower than average Emotional Intelligence (EQ). A low EQ in real life leads to poor decision-making and limited success. AI has the same limitations, plus negligible encoded morality, so it will solve a posed problem in its own terms and not the users’.
5. If you ask AI a question, based on its programming, it tries to answer it. Where valid information does not exist, it inserts available (often invalid) information. That is because a being with high EQ understands that “I don’t know,” is a perfectly acceptable answer to most questions.
6. AI-assisted search engines are not assisted by AI. They are annotated bibliographies, based on old code, that simply summarize the web pages being indexed for references to the subject being searched. As AI ain’t a people, it HAS NO INSTINCTS regarding whether the written source was valid or not. It doesn’t pull scientific data from only peer-reviewed sources. It treats a Reddit answer and the Encyclopedia Britannica the same. In time, this will improve, but it will never be able to probe the author and decide if s/he is a genius or a crackpot. That requires EQ.
7. EQ won’t be added to AI in this century.
8. Genius is creative and does not rely on prior genius. AI always relies on prior genius, and is even dependent on prior stupidity.
9. A hummingbird will learn to recognize the face of the woman who leaves it nectar, and will signal her when the nectar needs refilling. An ant, finding food, will leave a chemical trail to the other ants so that they can bring it back to the colony. AI can and will be able to do this. Is this intelligence? Yes. Is it human level? Fuck no.
10. Human-level intelligence is capable of instantaneously reviewing everything the human knows in order to offer a guess about a subject it knows little to nothing about. More importantly, the human will be able to tell you how certain s/he is of her answer, where the guess comes from, and how much of it is fact-based and how much is that bit of “insight” — the flash of genius that is the mind’s ability to make neural connections in a moment without a conscious awareness of having done so.
11. Compared to real geniuses, and I know quite a few of them, the most talented AI wouldn’t qualify to become enrolled as a student. To people with high IQs and EQs, AI systems are intrusive morons who keep trying to insert themselves in order to fuck shit up.
12. Why would you use a piece of software that smart people won’t use?

I read, reviewed, and analyzed not a goddamned thing in producing this article. Believe it or don’t. I ain’t AI, so I don’t give a fuck.

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