For once, let me write about something I know almost literally (and rest assured that I don’t mean literarily) nothing about. This ancient fellow—I’m now 82 years old and, like all of us, growing older by the day—is thinking—and you probably won’t be surprised to learn that, even at my age, I can still think less than artificially—about artificial intelligence, which has, of course, been reduced to AI by those who suspect that they already know all too much about it.

What brought this up for me? Well, one of my political favorites (or maybe he’s just a favorite, plain and simple), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), has called for a moratorium on data center construction across this country and only recently took on AI directly, writing a letter to the CEOs of three of the country’s leading AI companies, asking them: “Mr. Altman, Mr. Amodei, and Mr. Zuckerberg: In the interest of humanity, stand by your words. Pause AI development... It is not too late to avoid disaster. Stop building machines that humans cannot control.”

Of course, I couldn’t agree more with him, though I wonder if it isn’t already too late.

Let me start by telling you this: I made a decision that I would never purposely use AI in my lifetime. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m all too aware that, if I last another decade or so, I will undoubtedly be in a fully AI-ified world, whatever that might prove to mean. And I already know that, if I ask my computer to look for something online for me, AI instantly lends me a hand (if you can even say that AI has a hand), responding to my desires, whether I like it or not, with a pile of information and an “AI Overview,” and there’s not a damn thing that I can do about that.

AI already uses energy as if there were—gulp!—no tomorrow (or perhaps as if tomorrow were indeed going to burn us humans off Planet Earth).

Obviously, I have what I do (and don’t) know about this ever-changing world of ours on my mind right now. As a start, if you think about it for a moment (I mean really think about it), just calling it artificial intelligence is weirder than anyone seems to let on. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines the word “artificial” above all else as “made, produced, or done by humans especially to seem like something natural” and, of course, as it notes, it can also mean “fake.” In fact, what about renaming it Unnatural Machine Intelligence (UMI), or Strange Machine Intelligence (SMI), or even Eerie Machine Intelligence (EMI)? Or what about just Ificial Intelligence (II), since this old guy at least can’t see any “art” in it at all?

And as you might imagine, there’s still a fair amount that I can figure out for myself with only the slightest helping hand from AI (if at all). I don’t need artificial intelligence, for instance, just my very own limited version of intelligence, to know that Donald Trump is the most disturbingly artificial president in our history, period. And it’s all too clear to me that, whatever else AI may do (or undo), its data centers are going to use energy in a staggering fashion and so, undoubtedly, continue to pour fossil fuels into the atmosphere for the foreseeable future, lending us humans a distinct helping hand in overheating this planet in a big-time fashion.

In short (or do I mean in all too long?), artificial intelligence is guaranteed to add immeasurably to the Anything But Artificial Heat (ABAH) on this already Distinctly Overheating Planetary Environment (DOPE) of ours. After all, we already know that this July was the hottest month (no, not just the hottest July, but the hottest month!) in the recorded history of weather in the United States. In fact, as far as we know, as long as humans have been on this continent, ever.

And, honestly, how intelligent is a result like that, artificially or otherwise? Truly, I don’t need artificial intelligence, just my very own limited version of intelligence, to know........

© Common Dreams