I am a fan of Believer magazine and in the most recent edition (which I received in the mailbox earlier this week), I came across an article by Meghan O'Gieblyn and wow! did it put the hook in me. I mean she was talking all about the worship of artificial intelligence and the Book of Job and the burden of choice and what kind of god God was back in the fourteenth century versus now, and so on.
The kind of stuff that just enthralls the fuck outta me. (Needless to say I stayed up to finish the article, titled Good Shepherds.)
Now, in keeping with my ongoing blogpost series having to do with my latest novel, THE VALLEN, I am tying the loose threads begotten from O'Gieblyn's article about the godlike powers of artificial intelligence with those begotten from THE VALLEN.
In THE VALLEN, there are unseen algorithms which are used by a corpo-state to, at first, target advertisements for citizen-consumers, such as Essa (my MC). For instance, she goes to the store and in the Chocosnacks aisle there's a screen saying, "It's been almost a whole month since you've eaten a Chocosnack, time to buy one now!" and many, many more screens in her world.
But this A.I. advertising bonanza gets bent into uses for the security sector. There are facial recog devices which police use in interrogations; much like how a lie-detector test is used today but for the face.
Furthermore, the security forces in Cerec, Essa's home-township (exemplified by the iniquitous Sheriff Xi Ying), utilize these algorithmic do-dads to agglomerate data about citizen-consumers and sift through all that data to pick out worrisome and problematic patterns. The Sheriff is subsequently alerted to locate such and such person because they're, say, recently been out of a job, and posted some suspicious comments on-screen decrying the state of the society they live in, and are now currently wandering around a known seedy part of town...
Time to haul 'em in!
So, the point of O'Gieblyn's essay, in that even when people like Bill Gates and Elon Musk try to warn us know-nothings about the existential threat of A.I., they are actually assigning way more power to A.I. than A.I. itself, alone, can ever possess. She draws inference from her days in seminary, where God's word must go unquestioned and God works in mysterious ways — ways that no human could ever comprehend.
Do we not have the same sentiments towards A.I.? Whether as a tool or (as the recent Captain Marvel film puts forth) a Supreme Intelligence governing everyone?
But to think of A.I. as some sort of God-in-the-making is a fallacy. The only power A.I. actually possesses is that which people assign to it — and that inner workings which individuals (even the very Silicon tech titans who are most capable) dare not question.
However, no authority should ever go unquestioned. And the people of Cerec prove to the Sheriff, following Essa's example, that no people will suffer the rule of an unfeeling God, because to be unfeeling is to be like a machine and A.I. is no more than a self-learning machine, bound by the parameters assigned to it, and to be unable to feel, as you and I and every human feel and perceive the world and its justice through and with and by emotions, is to be unjust.
So, that's my spiel for this Saturday evening. Thank you and goodnight.