Digital Worries

  

Uncertain Times

            Technology shapes the times.  Eighty years ago, the world had entered the atomic age.  At first, only the U.S. had the bomb, but within a decade the “atomic club” included Britain, France, and (crucially) the Soviet Union.  I was born and grew up under the cloud of nuclear worry: Would the missiles fly?  What happens to human life if they do?  More decades passed, with more countries joining the club: China, Israel, North Korea, etc.  Only God (and the CIA?) knows which heads of state have the power to kill millions.

            Worries about thermonuclear weapons overshadowed the world I grew up in.  International leaders had to learn to talk with each other; when they failed to talk (as in October 1962) ordinary people cowered before the threat of war.  Political leaders concerned themselves with many diverse issues, but no one could escape the question of preventing war.  Peace through negotiation, peace through strength, peace through prosperity, peace through advanced technology (anti-ballistic missiles), and so on.  Only madmen would straightforwardly advocate war.

            Questions of nuclear security continue.  Mr. Trump says Iran must never have a nuclear weapon.  The judgment here is, I suppose, that no country dominated by certain versions of Islam can be trusted with weapons of mass destruction.  Maybe that’s true.  But it might be helpful to remember that communist governments have held nukes for decades without using them.  In the 1950s and 1960s, many voices said that godless Marxists could not be trusted with the bomb.  Gradually, we came to rely on mutually assured destruction.  Ideological opponents could learn to “coexist” (language of the 1960s) if they believed the other side believed that war would end civilization.

            We’ve learned to live with the bomb, even if we haven’t learned to love it.  (Remember Dr. Strangelove) That means living with anxiety, because some day some man or woman may press a button.

            In this decade, we’ve become aware of a new technology that may be just as anxiety-producing as H-bombs.  Our computers have been growing more powerful at an exponential rate.  According to Moore’s law, which is really an observation of recent history, not a natural law like Boyle’s law of gases, says that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles every two years.  In 1975, Gordon Moore speculated that this rapid increase in calculating power would continue for another ten years.  It has continued for fifty years, and tech companies have built empires in the expectation that it will continue.  Much of our post-industrial prosperity has come from the amazing growth in computing power.  Your hand-held phone contains a camera and a light and connects you to the Internet.

            But now we learn about Chat GPT—and dozens of other programs that can write to us (and for us).  Do the computers also think, or do they “just run programs”?  (Remember Short Circuit) Tech experts and philosophers are working on that question.  Interestingly, some of the big tech companies have started hiring Philosophy PhDs to help them think about their products.  We know that AI is coming.

            Are intelligent, autonomous computers a threat?  Already we have self-driving cars (which I predicted in 2015), and we laugh when we read of a group of Waymo taxis lost in a cul-de-sac.  We assume that all self-piloting vehicles will be programed to protect passengers and other human beings.  (Remember Isaac Asimov’s first law of robotics.)

            We’re pretty confident that medical diagnostic programs, translation programs, vehicle piloting programs, and many other complex computer systems will be benign.  We have some worry about energy management.  If there is not enough power to go around—in a winter storm, let’s say, when the grid loses some capacity because of wind, and it’s really cold—how will a computer prioritize energy distribution?

            Of course, we think that’s solvable.  But then we worry about military uses of AI.  The long history of warfare suggests that speed is often crucial to victory.  Of course, it’s not the only important factor, but smaller armies have often defeated more powerful but slower foes.  In the 21^st century, speed of decision making has become crucial.  Increasingly, we program our responses into computers, because AI can respond much faster than soldiers.  To win battles, we program computers to respond automatically.

            When does “automatically” become “autonomously”?  We worry about a computer that decides not just when to fire but whether to fire.

            In science fiction terror stories, the computer decides to eliminate us.  This is the computer apocalypse, which has already achieved “legend” status.  I’m confident I could find several such stories.  (How?  By a computer-aided Internet search, naturally.)  But our worries go further than that.  The autonomous program may decide that a certain weakness in the enemy’s defenses should be exploited—and the missiles fly.  How do we use computers to fight without letting them decide whether to fight?

            We have other worries about AI, unrelated to wars or bombs.  Some people have used AI technology to produce “revenge porn.”  I fully expect to see political ads containing falsified images of politicians in coming years.  Our social and political discourse has already been harmed by the way we retreat into Internet ghettos; AI will make it easier and more emotionally satisfying to ignore the humanity of the other side.

Apparently, there is profit in programming computers to call phone numbers (selected randomly or by algorithm) to sell insurance or home repairs or many other things.  I have made it my policy to never buy a product advertised this way; I insist on talking to a real person.

We live in uncertain times.  To some degree that has always been true.  But my lifetime, spanning the atomic age and the digital age, seems to be especially uncertain.  The fact that we have survived eighty years of the atomic age may give hope that we can meet the challenges of the digital age.