By: Michael McCarthy
Before he was booted off Fox News last Monday, Tucker Carlson did us all a favor: he interviewed Elon Musk about the dangers of Artificial Intelligence (AI). One of the dangers of AI popped up as I typed the previous sentence here on Microsoft Word. When I typed the word “Artificial,” Word put the word “Intelligence” in grey on the document. Microsoft calls it “text prediction” and explains: Editor anticipates your next words and suggests words or phrases as you type.
How Does It Know?
This reminds me of the old joke about a thermos jug: It keeps cold liquids cold, and it keeps hot liquids hot. How does it know?
I don’t know how MS Word knows which word to predict and suggest, but I have a theory. It keeps track of frequently used word pairs from the internet, and its’ algorithm then pops in a suggested word based on past usage by you or others. Since the words “artificial” and “intelligence” are frequently used together in news stories on the internet, MS Word pops it in.
So What’s the Problem?
So, what’s the problem with this? MS Word thinks it knows what word I want and “suggests” it for me on my screen. So far, so good. If I do want it, I press the tab key, and that word fills in, saving me some keystrokes. What if I don’t want that word? No problem. I keep typing, and the “grey word” disappears from my screen. My choice.
So here’s the potential problem. The history of central control, whether in governments or economies, is that the central controllers decide they know what’s best and remove the choice. Forced choice is no choice. It is coercion.
So, when I try to type “free market,” the online AI “text predictor” is now the online “text enforcer” and completes the word “free” with “free government-controlled markets” as the only allowed text in my document or post. Government control is now the default way, the only permitted way, of thinking about markets and economies. AKA mind control via AI.
When we go to online voting (and I predict we will), what gets filled in for us? When the ballot reads: Congressperson – the computer will fill in “Democrat” and won’t allow you to change it. This is AI at work. It tells you what to want, whether it is a word or a candidate. “Oh,” you say, “another crazy conspiracy theory!” Read on.
Elon and Tucker give us the Dots to Connect
In the interview, Elon and Tucker give us the dots. It is up to us to connect them. Elon explains that back in the day, he co-founded Open AI, a non-profit that was supposed to safeguard against the dangers of AI by keeping the source code for AI open. If you know the source code, you can change it or disable it.
However, as Elon focused on big projects like Tesla and SpaceX, he lost control of Open AI. Tucker Carlson says it is now controlled by Microsoft and the Democratic Party. Uh-oh! AI is not so open! Now you know the specific dot that I connected to the “voting conspiracy theory” in the online voting scenario above.
https://www.americaoutloud.com/elon-musk-is-wrong-about-ai-regulation/