If A.I. takes over, does the "New World Order" have any need for "humans"?

 

I have a book written by David Harvie entitled Deadly Sunshine: The History and Fatal Legacy of Radium, which while noting that radiation in “safe” quantities has many useful applications, especially in medicine, it took some time to understand what exactly “safe” was. Products like Radithor, basically radioactive water, was sold as a “cure-all”; it’s best known adherent, a wealthy socialite named Eben Byers, who after sustaining an injury was “prescribed” the concoction and found that it not only “cured” the pain but made him feel “livelier.” He took to drinking whole bottles of it at a time, and enthusiastically recommended it to any who would listen.

Unfortunately for Byers, testing for safety was still in its infancy, even after the uproar created by Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle in regard to the meatpacking industry, which strenuously opposed a federal law requiring the dating of meat products. People were fascinated by new products with fantastical properties promising fantastical results, and in Byers’ case he was “all in.” 

When the reality of what radium's true "qualities" were finally caught up with him, holes in his skull exposed brain matter, his lower jaw and chin was gone, and two teeth were the only evidence that he had an upper jaw left; most of the rest of his skeletal structure was similarly in the process of disintegration:

 

 

And then there was the famous “Radium Girls.” Marie Curie, the best known of the discoverers of radiation, wrote the original entry on the subject in the Encyclopedia Britannica. In it we find this statement:

By incorporating radium with phosphorescent zinc sulphide it is possible to obtain luminous paints giving a weak light visible in darkness. The most important use of this paint is for watches. The quantity necessary is of the order of one-tenth of a milligramme per gramme of zinc sulphide. After several years, the phosphorescent product is altered by the action of the rays and becomes less luminous, though the quantity of radium has not changed appreciably.

Except to say that the luminosity properties of radium declines with time, there is no indication that radium is in and of itself dangerous despite the fact that its radioactive properties do not break down very readily with time; in fact Curie continued to enthuse over the many uses of radium even as it was slowly killing her. Curie would eventually die of radiation poisoning, and her remains are so radioactive that it is enclosed in a casket of lead.

It seems that before anyone got the “message,” businesses like the U.S Radium Corporation, and more infamously, the Radium Dial Company, came into being to turn a profit on Curie’s idea. Women were employed to do the delicate paint work on watches and clocks using radioactive paint; licking the paint brushes was a common practice, but the “girls” also had “fun” using the paint as makeup and even applying it to their teeth. 

Of course they were not told that it was dangerous to "play"--let alone work--with radioactive paint, although to "assure" itself of its "safety" the Radium Corporation brought in the Harvard School of Public Health to do a study at their plant, which found evidence of serious trouble; but the company decided to table the findings and just made “suggestions” to the workers about things they shouldn’t do.

Meanwhile, nothing seemed amiss even after Radium Dial’s chief chemist died of radiation poisoning, but once it could no longer be hidden that many of the “Radium Girls” were dying, the courts stepped in to punish the perpetrating corporations in class action lawsuits. Some of these women became “celebrities” even as they awaited death, which was satirized in the Carole Lombard film Nothing Sacred.

The radium story is one instance of a technology that seems to have unlimited possibilities, with understanding the consequences something that can wait. Today people talk about A.I.—artificial intelligence—as some fantastical thing that will lead to “new world order.” The idea isn’t exactly new; it was the stuff of science fiction since at least the 1950s, and usually something “dangerous” if it could not be controlled. 

There was the Krell machine in Forbidden Planet, the various rogue computers and robots that Kirk and company encountered in Star Trek, Harry Palmer matching wits with The Billion Dollar Brain, the out-of-control killer robots in Westworld, and of course there was HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Even when you give A.I. "human" emotions, as in Blade Runner, they may act more "human" than we would like.

Of course today scientists and swell-headed entrepreneurs are far more ahead on the "thinking" than the actual "doing." After all, we were supposed to be sending humans on flights to Jupiter by 2001, and today it is considered “progress” to do something we already did in 1969 (a manned flight to the Moon). What we've been "good" at is finding ways to extend life a few years and create contraptions like "smart" phones which only seem to create more time to exchange gibberish and less time spent thinking about the state of the world that is becoming less hospitable and less subject to correction, with no "alternative" planet in sight, except in fantasy.

In a 2018 article in The New Yorker, Tad Friend tell us that  we are not “eager to contemplate the prospect of our irrelevance” in a future world of A.I., and thus we “relish” it’s embarrassing “snafus.” For example, Google was unable to prevent its “photo recognition” software from identifying black people as “gorillas,” and it was forced to remove “gorillas” from the program. Friend notes, however, that we should not be too self-congratulatory in our "superiority" over the machine just yet.

in fact some scientists like Noah Harari seem to concede the prospect of the irrelevance of humanity in a world of A.I., and as Friend writes we might as well be basking "in the late-winter sun of our sovereignty.”  After all, “what remains to us alone?” According to “Larry Tesler, the computer scientist who invented copy-and-paste, has suggested that human intelligence ‘is whatever machines haven’t done yet,'" and if they do, given the nature of machine over biology, then what use are we?

For now, humans possess "intuition" which would seem difficult to program into a computer. In the Star Trek episode “The Ultimate Computer,” the M-5 is tested on the Enterprise in the hope of making human operators redundant. Unfortunately, during a “war game,” the M-5 becomes paranoid and reacts instinctively to what it perceives are “real” attacks on itself, not understanding the indications, as Kirk does, that it is not “real.” We discover that the M-5 was imbued with its creator’s paranoid delusions, and in the end it only understands that causing death can only be counteracted by its own "death."

Thus while others imagine a world where A.I. can be “human,” it depends on the programmer; after all we don’t want a megalomaniac like Elon Musk or a white nationalist like Laura Ingraham deciding what is “human” anymore than a mass-murderer like Adolf Hitler (or Vladimir Putin). Stephen Hawking noted that the “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.”

Friend writes that humans could just give it all up, and let A.I. take care of everything while humans have nothing better to do but pursue “higher” pursuits (I’m reminded of the world envisioned in John Boorman’s film Zardoz). Garry Kasparov—the former world chess champ who was famously defeated by an IBM computer—conceded as much:

Using computers for “the more menial aspects” of reasoning will free us, elevating our cognition “toward creativity, curiosity, beauty, and joy.” If we don’t take advantage of that opportunity, he concludes, “we may as well be machines ourselves.” Only by relying on machines, then, can we demonstrate that we’re not.

So far, we haven’t invented robots that with manual dexterity of humans, and heaven help us if we do, since an “unintuitive” machine will have no moral qualms about how it uses its “dexterity” against human flesh—especially if it reacts too “literally” when a human in a fit of anger wishes on "death" someone, and the robot carries out the command; as Friend notes, we can teach the “game” of life, but not its “rules.”

How to stop the misuse of an unintuitive machine? According to a security-software entrepreneur named Amir Husain, “we must fight A.I. with A.I.,” meaning that the way to stop a rogue A.I. is to simply confront it with a “stronger” A.I.—and who knows where that can lead.

In the end we realize the human existence is just a blip on the grand scale of the universe—or even in comparison to the time dinosaurs roamed the earth, 165 million years, at least at rate we are making this planet unlivable for ourselves. Maybe A.I. will be the only evidence of a "superior" being once inhabiting the planet before it destroyed itself, as occurred in Forbidden Planet.

In the meantime, most of us are aware of what is currently the most ubiquitous and annoying function of “A.I.”—“chatbots,” which many companies use in place of “humans” for customer service, and frequently seem to be lacking in “intelligence.” But A.I. enthusiasts tell us that A.I. has a great future in the medical field and in education. Others reassure us that machines can be "programmed" to do mundane “chores” like driving, cooking, cleaning, fighting wars—or even just “living.” Of course "autopilot" and "cruise control" can't do everything we need them to do yet:

 

The Pew Research Center interviewed people interested in the subject and found that

The experts predicted networked artificial intelligence will amplify human effectiveness but also threaten human autonomy, agency and capabilities. They spoke of the wide-ranging possibilities; that computers might match or even exceed human intelligence and capabilities on tasks such as complex decision-making, reasoning and learning, sophisticated analytics and pattern recognition, visual acuity, speech recognition and language translation. They said “smart” systems in communities, in vehicles, in buildings and utilities, on farms and in business processes will save time, money and lives and offer opportunities for individuals to enjoy a more-customized future.

But as noted, philosophizing about this subject has been around for a long time. If you are going to be a “one-hit wonder,” you might as well make it doozy, like Zager & Evans’ “In the Year 2525” which “predicted” the consequences of uncontrolled technology and its effect on human existence:

In the year 2525, if man is still alive
If woman can survive, they may find
In the year 3535
Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lie
Everything you think, do and say
Is in the pill you took today
In the year 4545
You ain't gonna need your teeth, won't need your eyes
You won't find a thing to chew
Nobody's gonna look at you
In the year 5555
Your arms hangin' limp at your sides
Your legs got nothin' to do
Some machine's doin' that for you

Frankly, I’m not sure humans will still be around come the year 2525, let alone a livable planet. Pew provides these more substantive “concerns” about A.I., including the possibility of military applications running amok and a world in a destabilized state of mayhem—the exact opposite that A.I. is supposed to create:

 

Of course, the more optimistic assert with a little effort and keeping the technology out of the hands of terrorists, megalomaniacs (Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un), fun-seeking computer hackers (Mathew Broderick’s character in WarGames) or your typical mad scientist or billionaire (Musk), we have nothing to "worry" about. Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence assures us that in 2,000 years when humans are all gone, A.I. beings will still be around, some of them cute kids programmed to “love.”

Some future we can look forward to, isn’t it--with human existence no more "relevant" for lack of better things to do other than eat, sleep or talk gibberish, which A.I. doesn't need to do; if such machines would become that "smart," they would be justified in destroying a life form seemingly devoted to the destruction of both of their environments.  

Oh, what the hell, for all we know we could be living in a world like that of Fassbinder's World on a Wire, where we are being "played" like the characters in one of those computer simulation games that look so "realistic." After all, are we not some "creation" made in some god's "image"?