June 2023
AI. Movies.
The pandemic is well and truly over. I think we need a new name for this newsletter or whatever this is. Et voila, the Vaccine is now hereby christened the What Ho! newsletter. The name is a throwback to my erstwhile blog which reached dizzying heights of popularity in the days before blogs stopped being a thing.
The world is changing in a dramatic way. You may have heard of Generative Artificial Intelligence, Large Language Models, and such. I’ll just refer to them as AI to keep things simple. Is AI a good thing or a bad thing? Will it end civilization? What Ho! What gives?
First, technology is just an amplifier. It makes good things way way better. It can make bad things way worse. What’s interesting about AI is that we can have a coherent interaction with something that is not human. The last time we did that, it was with a parrot. You can train a parrot to say a few words, and even to talk back. You can have some conversation with it. At the end of the day, you know that it’s a parrot. No one was impressed. With AI, it’s a little different. We’ve been acquainted with the likes of chatGPT for about six months now. Few know what is going on under the hood. You type in some words, and it responds politely like actual person in a call center who is well-trained.
The English is immaculate. There aren’t any spelling mistakes. It is error free not just grammatically but semantically too. And you think to yourself, “Holy shit. This thing is alive.” Little do you realize that you’re talking to a very sophisticated parrot. As it turns out, languages are heavily rule based. Few know or realize this. When I start a sentence with ‘When’, that automatically constrains the possible set of words that follow the word ‘When.’ Language has these rules to provide coherence. If you feed a lot of sentences to machines and have them analyze for rules, you can actually come up with a decent prediction engine that can spit out well-crafted sentences, given a context. This thing is not alive. Will it someday become “conscious” and “sentient”? People who ask such questions or worse, believe that AI will someday become conscious have no idea what “consciousness” means. This is rooted in a misguided and rudimentary understanding of consciousness in the Western Hemisphere. It is a whole separate story. I will save it for another day. So the short answer is no. A computer or a set of computers will not become conscious in the real sense of the word. They will however become way more intelligent than parrots. They already are.
The unfortunate reality of the Industrial Revolution was that it created millions of jobs, most of which required no more than a parrot level intelligence because they had to get work done in a fool proof manner. These jobs required a modicum of intelligence but never creativity or character or flamboyance or emotion, things which really make humans human. A lot of the work that we do today does not even require us to understand why we are doing it. If parrots had arms and legs and slightly larger brains, we might even have hired parrots do the work in the first place. This is the dirty secret of the Industrial Revolution. It was never meant to spark a flowering of human intelligence or creativity. It was all about unlocking our inner parrots so the oligarchs and the governments could be made happy. It should come as no surprise that a modestly intelligent computer can do most of these jobs. I say, this is all for the best. To be a human and work as a parrot is demeaning. We will finally be rid of our misery. How will we spend our leisure time? How will we make money? That is yet another story for yet another day.
To get really deep and philosophical for a second, space and time are the interfaces we use to interact with Reality, the thing that lies beneath it all. Some call it God. Some say there is nothing. Some say there is a field. Whatever there is or not, we humans found space and time complicated to deal with, and so we have been building all sorts of tools to interface with them. In this process, we lost sight of reality but gained a much better handle on space and time themselves. Language is one such tool. Screens are another. Language started with grunts. The screen started as a wall in a cave. We’ve come a long, long way since. This has been the story of technology in a nutshell. There isn’t really anything to fear. We’ve had the ability to destroy ourselves for thousands of years and we’ve never really been serious about it. It is the narcissism of the living to believe that they’re uniquely positioned to either transform or destroy the world.
I hope you’re doing well and out and about in the world now that we are allowed to. I hope you’re able to find time to watch movies and television and read books and what not. I am looking forward to catching “Oppenheimer” and the next installment of Mission Impossible in the theaters in July. The movies are a funny business. Great movies have always been exceptions since movies got started. These days, that is truer than ever. The highs of great movies are still quite high even now, but there just aren’t as many of them these days. For sure, television has cut deeply into theatrical audiences. Three million people watched the season finale of Succession on HBO. Many film makers would kill to have such numbers. It’s all about Marvel movies or big budget television franchises like Game of Thrones nowadays. They are formidable competitors and come with pre-existing, fiercely loyal fan tribes.
Why have audiences turned away from cinema? I don’t think economics alone explains it. Sure, it is cheaper to buy a streaming service that spews countless hours of “content” as compared to twenty dollars per person for a movie. But the movies haven’t provided great art either. I lament the decline of the great movies. There is something to be said about watching a piece of art for the first time without pre-existing loyalty or a vested interest. For a moment, however brief, we get a glimpse of “the Reality.” The mere act of watching movies instills in us a certain independence of spirit that franchises can never aspire to. These days, making a great movie almost feels like an act of rebellion. An act of resistance in response to a world that has divided itself into tribes. In its own way, so is watching them. Do get out to the theaters and watch a couple every now and then if you can.
Have a great summer. I’ll see you next when I see you next.