I ask you: What is AI?

Artificial intelligence, you reply.

Sure, but what is it? Really?

I suppose we first need to get a handle on what defines those two terms: artificial & intelligence—and I think the first is likely easier to get our minds around than the latter.

Let’s get that one out of the way then: the term artificial can perhaps be defined easily by its negative. Artificial, for example, might be thought of as something that is not genuine. Something that is not natural. Something that is an imitation, a simulation or a fabrication designed, perhaps, to mimic what we might otherwise consider to be real.

More precisely, the etymology of the word gives us a more positive example. Something artificial is something that is crafted by art, made by humans, designed, built and invented by effort of us. Something artificial then might simply and most clearly be thought of as something that someone used their human intelligence to bring into existence.

Ah, but what is intelligence then?

A much more complex answer is required for that, I say.

For example, a dictionary will simply tell you that intelligence is the ability of a thing to gather and synthesize information into knowledge and understanding.

Sounds easy, you reply.

But wait, I reply, what you may not see is that from there on in we delve into what is almost certainly a quagmire of philosophical pondering and metaphysical analysis: the human mind trying to understand itself is a profession nearly as old as humans themselves. A mirror looking at its own reflection. What is thought? What is consciousness? What is the self, the mind, the soul and the spirit? What is it that makes us human? How can we even know that every other person we know thinks in the same manner as we do—and by that we don’t refer to content or concept, but simply trying to gauge the depth to which their mind is actually a mind like our own and that they are not simply a reactive automaton, a robot, an alien force, a simulation, an… artificial intelligence.

Together we join these words into a modern catchphrase and shorten it to just two letters that carry all the weight of a shift in the course of human history: artificial intelligence or AI.

AI then is, not-so-simply, something that we made that has the ability to gather knowledge and synthesize understanding.

AI is a tool, a technology, and a kind of metaphorical progeny of ourselves: our attempt to remake our own minds in craft and art and design.

We have chosen as a species (dictated by the history of our scientific pursuits, of course) to have done this with silicon computers—though, one might speculate that in an alternate timeline perhaps we may have sought to accomplish such things with steam valves and brass cogs or neutrinos colliding with atoms or quantum interference patterns resolving upon clouds of stardust or even with microscopic sacs of self-replicating organic chemistry brewing inside a calcium-rich orb. We take computer circuits etched into silicon wafers as the de facto method because it is a mature craft: we can make complex things with this understanding we have. We can build machines of such enormous complexity that any other approach seems as much science fiction as thinking machines would have seemed to our recent ancestors.

Yet, here we are. I say. Look at us. We have made something that, though often arguably lacking or laughable or uncanny or a thing that draws any of a hundred other pejorative pokes, is an imperfect beast and now made and unleashed. It is far past time we all started asking what exactly this artificial intelligence might actually be—and what it will bring upon a society and a species whose perhaps greatest competitive advantage in the universe has been its higher cognitive prowess.

This is an introduction to what I am hoping will be a series of reflective essays and technological deep dives into the social implications of AI.

I have been told repeatedly, often by people with stake in the game of business, life, and culture, that AI is nothing to be feared, a tool to be embraced and a paradigm that has shifted long past and to just climb aboard.

But while these systems will almost certainly not challenge our physical humanity with violence or in any of the multitude of science-fiction spectacle ways of popular literature and media, what I see happening already is that we seem to be emmeshed in a fight for intellectual effort for which we may have neither the endurance nor strength to win: out-competed by automated systems, siloed by information algorithms, strip-mined of our creative outputs and reduced to a livestock-like herd for our attention by technology so fast as complex that it is steps ahead of us in a race we don’t even realize we are running.

It is the poets against the processors.

And what then is AI? I ask you.

We made it to mimic ourselves, our minds. It is yet imperfect, and perhaps little more than a simulation of our humanity. Yet, it is a tool that amplifies evil as much as it does good. It is a technology that yokes us into dependency. It is a system that robs us blind and vanishes into the digital ether. It is something we can barely even define, let alone understand and control—and it would be arrogance in the extreme to think otherwise.

please note: I am writing a substack blog about artificial intelligence and its implications in society and will be cross-posting some of the articles here. This is one of those articles.