One of those days where I think artificial intelligence is overhyped …

A few years back, I read Pierre Boulle‘s classic, “Planet of the Apes (1963).” I had the book sitting on my bookshelf since junior year in high school, ever since disco was still a thing. Fortunately, I kept the book as I moved from the Caribbean to and through the US mainland. Once I started to read it, I could not put it down. While many have focused on the twist at the end of the book (one just as shocking as the twist depicted at the end of the 1968 film adaptation), what I found interesting was Boulle’s treatment of intelligence.

My takeaway from the book was that intelligence is nothing more than imitation. What we “learn” and express are rehashes of passed down thought. We, as a species, are really not as innovative as we would like to think. We are not doing anything new. We are just doing old things in a new way with the old things covered in a veneer of shiny technology.

What got me thinking about the issue of intelligence was a story this morning in Bloomberg that Elon Musk’s Neuralink Corp., successfully implanted a chip into a patient’s brain. Musk has been talking about the integration of humans and machines for years and today, Earth’s inhabitants are getting public glimpses of the joining.

The topic of integration has come closer to the surface after 14 months of the general public’s exposure to artificial intelligence via modes like Chat GPT. To adapt to a world where data collection and dissemination is increasingly machine driven, humans, according to Musk, may have to integrate with machine. The thought of this has some people nervous with the biggest point of concern being loss of jobs.

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My concern has been the potential threat to thought, specifically the hacking of originality. But when I think of the bare basics of artificial intelligence, which is the exploitation of databases to identify patterns of data and organize the data such that a prediction can be made about the next decision, I have to conclude that it is not AI, machine learning, technology assisted review, or computer assisted learning we have to worry about. It is coming to grips with our lack of originality; that value will be found in original thought that is likely not in any of the databases we have access to today. 

The reason? Because everything we know, including the AI itself, is simply imitation and in the case of AI, imitation on steroids.

Alton Drew

30 January 2024

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