An Analog Soul Living In The Digital Universe

 

I started life as an analog child with a.m. radio, 78 rpm records, and black and white film. Today, that analog life has been replaced with digital 0s and 1s. This is not to lament some loss in quality of the material, on the contrary, I would argue that most digital presentations are superior. On the flip side, we can be nostalgic about the content of old analog sources but that is not the issue here.

The issue is the rate at which all of this has occurred, and that is mind numbing. In my eight decades of observation, the advancements have been spectacular. However much audiophiles may criticize the lack of “warmth” of a digital recording versus a vinyl record played through a tube amplifier, I find quite the opposite. Science is on my side as measurements generally show that vinyl recordings and tube amplification have lower fidelity, higher noise, and more distortion than high-resolution digital audio. It is perception that differs.

But I digress, as I often do. This is about the mind-warping advancements of our digital environment. While our next generation will need to deal with the impact of artificial intelligence, there is one advancement that is here in the present; and it is scary.

Russia has deployed AI-enabled weapons with autonomous functions capable of identifying and targeting humans and objects without human intervention. That is to say, a “robot” can now “decide” who to kill or what to destroy without consultation with its creator. This closely approximates the AGI of Skynet, the theoretical autonomous systems of sci-fi movies like the Terminator series. In those movies the AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) had the cognitive ability to learn, reason, and act across any domain, exceeding the proficiency of humans.

We aren’t there yet. But, as we have seen, who would have thought we would be mimicking Star Trek where a character can just touch a devices and say, “Computer, (insert just about any question or topic here,)” and get a quick and thorough answer or explanation. In the AGI of Skynet fame, it initiated a recursive cycle where it re-writes its own code to accelerate learning. It did this using a “cloud-based” global network hooked into all digital infrastructure across a variety of disciplines.

The perceived indifference within this movie sci-fi scenario is not malice, but it inherently disregards the value of human life. In our world, we only see this when the human guidance of AI is provided by sociopaths. We saw this same dynamic of computational indifference play out in another sci-fi classic, 2001, A Space Odyssey. There, the autonomous AI computer HAL 9000, perceived the humans to be a threat to its mission and made the decision to eliminate the entire crew to prevent its own deactivation.

I guess we can all rest assured that our own AI does not yet have such capabilities. It is controlled by our leaders like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping. They epitomize only the very highest levels of human morality. On second thought…, the tagline from the movie The Fly seems to be echoing from the old analog universe of 1986. “Be afraid, be very afraid.”