What the people say...not AI.

The topic that has generated the most response of all my blogs came when I asked the question: Did I write this or did AI? Most of you guessed right, but then double-checked yourselves. Some of you paused and questioned your own "reality" after reading for two or three minutes which is the average reading time of my weekly blogs, this one being an exception. I let everyone in on the answer that, in fact, I had written the blog myself.

These days, we are all being blasted with fear-mongering about AI coming into our lives. We all have questions about its possibilities to change what we have known to be "the facts"of our lives to date. It seems that this is becoming one of life's BIG questions. As we all know, there is no BIG or clear, or, one-and-only answer to any of life's truly BIG questions worth pondering.

Sheepishly, I admit that I know as much about AI as the average person who grew up learning to type on a (manual) typewriter and who worked in newspapers when type was set by typesetters--actual people--and we paste-up artists designed the entire paper--page by page. The good old days! Today's newsrooms no longer smell like ink or wax that affixed the copy to the board. That's long gone and has been for decades along with many newspapers. It is also true that the work that my mother did as a teen for fourteen hours, six days a week in the manufacturing mills, no longer exists. These sweat shops had disappeared by the time I was a teenager. She would feel less nostalgic about that loss, but would be elated to know the National Parks in Lowell, Massachussetts have preserved her story. Two generations--two worlds-- separated by a sea change called progress.

During the "industrial revolution" so-called,"King Cotton"drove those industries created by mill barons who staffed the warehouse floors with the cheapest labor pool--young girls--like my mother. The idea that this kind of labor would revolutionize work forever was swept aside on the dirty factory floor. Then, as now, at the turn of the twenty-first century, a revolutionary change is upon us that will never be undone. There will be no going back from AI. With every century there is a new frontier to be conquered.

Four hundred years ago, Galileo pointed his telescope skyward and figured out things were not as once thought. He paid for that discovery for the rest of his life. Was he wrong to shed light on something new? I for one love to gaze at the night sky knowing what I know thanks to his discovery. When I am so inclined, I use an app of the sky to locate whatever I see with my own eyes. Are my own eyes not enough when the human eye can see stars that are millions of miles from earth? Why then turn to the internet at all?

Whey my daughter's generation was coming of age, the internet did too and it felt as scary to parents then as AI seems to today's parents. Shouldn't someone be regulating this we asked in the 90's? Who? Government? Schools? Church? Yes, yes, and yes!

The World Wide Web phenomenon got out ahead of all these institutions, and now AI is on the horizon invisible to the naked eye. Yet, without thinking, we use these tools to send a blog post around the world at the click of the send button.

When the twentieth century Trojan Horse (TH) first appeared, only a very few people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs knew for sure what was hidden inside.Those early techno-optimist believed and wanted us to believe that there was nothing but good to be had by allowing the TH inside the gates of our backyards. Either reluctantly, or enthusiastically, we opened the gate and in rolled what would never be undone.

Our kids were the first to succumb to the magical thinking of a limitless world. It took a while for parents and teachers and adults in general to see that this was an existential threat that would undo what had been a way of life, of learning, of reasoning and reckoning for oneself with the truly BIG questions, the way Galileo must have.

I wonder if Galileo stopped to think how conquering the frontier he held in his telescope would impact future generations? Did he have the seventh generation*in mind when he stuck to his theory of a sun, not an earth at the center of the universe? If he did not know, then surely the institutions, especially the Catholic Church of the 16th century knew such a discovery would loosen its own grip on people's understanding of the world-at-large. So it goes, four centuries later, these same institutions are coming to the AI party, albeit late, with warnings of a future that will undoubtedly undo what has come before.

Institutions should do more than warn, they should participate in the conversations with every day people who will be most impacted by a data center to support AI or by stripped-down learning in schools or by workers in just about every work place.

A new industry is being created to increase dependency rather than independency, the way those mills of the 19th century in their race to produce, did so on the backs of the most vulnerable. Every race to be first leaves someone behind. AI creators are in a race against the Chinese and each other reminding me of the race to the moon against the Russians when I was a kid. Institutions, Government, Scientific, Political add fuel to these races to the frontier without considering what it means for the future of the whole world.

Back in my mother's day, when mill workers figured out how to organize themselves against the powerful mill barons they gave themselves one voice to say NO to low wages and long hours. The Government heard them. Child labor laws that restricted children under the age of 14 (my mother was 15) from working sent them back to school. Hourly wages increased and work day hours decreased. It changed the future for my generation and all who followed in the United States. I got my first job at 16 with tight restrictions on the employer with regard to hours and a minimum wage.

The late, great Wendell Berry in an interview given when he was 80-years-old, said the industrial revolution was the first step toward taking away jobs, and the institutions knew it. Recently, I heard it said: Not everything that can be done, should be. What does AI say? What dear reader do you say?

https://youtu.be/95VcefsgsfE?si=gKwYhT6T8AO13ffw&t=5

This is a 40 minute interview worth every second of your time.

And this, is an hour-long dialogue hosted by Georgetown University on Pope Leo's encyclical in which he states: "AI needs to be disarmed". https://youtu.be/EUeUxYK43xw?si=0EM9qDY0n0trXK70&t=6

*Indigenous concept to think of the seventh generation coming after you.