Artificial Intelligence Still Needs Some Work

By SAM URETSKY

There are probably more versions of the “Ballad of John Henry” than the cross ties on the railroad/ and the stars in the skies, but the key to the story of Man vs. Machine is:

The man that invented the steam drill,
He figured he was mighty high and fine,
But John Henry sunk the steel down fourteen feet
While the steam drill only made nine, Lord, Lord,
The steam drill only made nine.

A more sophisticated version might be Lord Byron’s speech in parliament (2/27/1812) in which he defended the Luddites and opposed the Frame Breaking Act of 1812, which would have applied the death penalty to anyone who broke a sock knitting machine. Byron’s side lost.

This is an old story, and the stock response has been that every improvement in mechanization has been followed by economic growth, more jobs and more wealth. The steam drill, after all, made it possible to lay more railroad tracks more quickly, leading to better, faster transportation, of people and goods. On a broad scale this helped grow the economy, but it led to other changes as well. Many of the small cow towns featured in the western movies became ghost towns when they were bypassed by the railroads. This was largely repeated when the Eisenhower administration funded the interstate highways. Each of these towns had a saloon, a hotel, blacksmith, and dry goods stores, and their trade dried up. Mechanization, essentially the precursor of robotics, was economically beneficial on a large scale, but disastrous on a human level.

Also, the people defending robotics were economists and editorial writers, who were still far away from the types of simple tasks that machines could replace. When Henry Ford developed the assembly line, he essentially divided automobile production into a series of steps, each of which could be mechanized, and dehumanized. It’s easy, too easy, to imagine robots extending their reach into different occupations. If a robot can vacuum your carpet, then with minor modifications it could mow your lawn.

Now there’s a great deal of discussion about ChatGPT, a new artificial intelligence program from Open AI. The precursor was Watson, from IBM, which defeated both Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter at “Jeopardy” – but Watson simply showed how much more quickly it could access the Internet than a human. Ask Siri a question on your iPhone and it will provide you with relevant links far more quickly than you could type them into a search engine. ChatGPT does the same thing only faster, and can draw subjects based on context. It’s impressive, but hardly perfect – yet. It can make mistakes because its source material is filled with mistakes. Ask it who won the presidential election of 2020 and, unless specially trained, it can’t distinguish between Twitter and the New York Times. According to a report in CNet “The software developer site StackOverflow banned ChatGPT answers to programming questions. Administrators cautioned, “because the average rate of getting correct answers from ChatGPT is too low, the posting of answers created by ChatGPT is substantially harmful to the site and to users who are asking or looking for correct answers.”

ChatGPT is impressive, but it is still the new improved Watson. It can write a convincing seventh grade essay, but can’t do a reasonable job of fact checking, and while it can write a poem, it won’t have the feeling that is poetry. It lacks imagination, vision and understanding of what it has written.

Right now, ChatGPT’s data is updated to 2021, making it useless for anything in the New York Times or Washington Post. It has the accuracy of a Magic 8 Ball and the literary style of Donald Trump (or the other way around). For now, it’s a wonderful toy, and hopefully, in a century or so, we’ll find a suitable silver lining, but while the machine can’t replace the human, it has already given us plenty to think about over those 100 years.

To quote Kipling:

“As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;”

Sam Uretsky is a writer and pharmacist living in Louisville, Ky. Email sdu01@outlook.com.

From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2023

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