Artificial Intelligence and Us

Over the past few months, I’ve thought about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the chatbot known as ChatGPT. It’s going to affect us, even here at Fairway Village.

In 1968, some of us watched: “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The main character was a computer enhanced with AI, the HAL 9000. Recent developments such as ChatGPT suggest that we’re getting closer to that vision of AI.

I loved rewatching 2001. It includes references that I remember fondly, such as Pan American, Howard Johnson’s, AT&T (with the bell logo), and the Blue Danube waltz.

If you’ve seen 2001, you probably remember HAL. It was the model of perfection, until it was not. HAL was the 6th member of the crew, traveling to Jupiter, enhanced with a vision of AI from 1968.

In the movie, everyone had confidence in HAL. It made no errors. But what’s an error? It depends on the teacher, and what the student learns from the teacher. In 1968, teachers filtered content from textbooks. Today, those who teach ChatGPT filter content from the internet. Reliable content depends on the judgment of those teachers. Otherwise, AI becomes “Garbage In, Garbage Out” (GIGO).

If HAL was perfect, how did it decide that a mission was more important than the lives of the astronauts? And if the mission was to find evidence of aliens, why exclude humans from the mission?

Computers can certainly solve well-defined problems faster than humans. But the choices that AI makes depend on how its trained. And that depends on the experience of the teacher. The phenomena is known as “cognitive bias.”

While I believe in the future of AI, I recognize the problems, including GIGO and cognitive bias. But it can also help us get better answers.