To Hell with the Digital Revolution and Its Bastard Child AI
Paul Craig Roberts
It has been pointed out that human interaction has been replaced by an app, a code, a portal that a large percentage of the population finds frustrating and inconvenient, especially for older people who did not grow up with the isolating and often difficult to use technology. The people who crammed this technology down our throats in order that they could make more money praise the “innovation.” But in fact it is a technology that isolates people and takes control away from them.
And brings failure. Not a week passes, and sometimes not a day, that I don’t experience the time-consuming failure of the digital systems to work. Why they fail so often I don’t know. Perhaps they are poorly thought out and will improve with time. Perhaps the instability in digital systems is due to the insecurity of the Internet, which requires more and more layers of security hoops to jump through in order to make a connection. One result is security system incompatibilities that result in dysfunction. Perhaps use is rising faster than the systems can accommodate. I think the only reason there has not been a generalized breakdown is that there are some elements left of the analogue system that, with effort, can still be contacted to bypass or correct the dysfunctioning digital system.
I just had another bad experience with “smart” people-free systems. I received an email telling me to confirm and do an early checkin online for an upcoming medical telephone appointment. Now you can do an annual checkup without having to see a doctor. I began the process and immediately encountered a problem. I was asked to confirm my telephone number. It was incorrect from three years ago. I entered the correct number, and the red box appeared: “This is not the number we have on file. Please enter a correct number.” I had entered the correct number as requested in the update, but as far as the AI system was concerned the correct number was the old number. I puzzled why an old number was in the system as I have twice been in person in the office providing all the latest information and have even had telephone calls from the medical practice on the new number that AI tells me is not on file.
So I picked up my cell phone, which sometimes works, and called. I only had to wait 3 minutes for a human instead of being subjected to a callback within 48-hours, and in 2 more minutes the human had fixed the problem
I wondered how much the medical practice had paid for a digital system that did not work and was probably causing its patients stress-induced heart attacks.
I am convinced that the digital revolution and the AI it spawned will fail, because it will be overwhelmed by complexity. Moreover, once the quantum computers are up and running there will be no such thing as security. So bright boys will have institutionalized an insecure and dysfunctional system, a system whose achievement will have been to further dehumanize an already dehumanized society and impose massive costs for resurrecting the foolishly discarded analogue system which worked and did not dehumanize us.
When the digital system fails, who will there be with the skills and intelligence to rebuild the analogue system that worked? Will there even be a workforce available? The products of AI education are not capable of operating in an analogue system that relies on human ability. AI will have raised generations of illiterates who cannot read, write, do math and who have never learned to think. In the 1950s Mad comic book parodied our present time. AI operated everything, and one day the machine broke and no one knew how to fix it. Amazing that a comic book editor three-quarters of a century ago had more sense than the multi-billionaire architects of AI today.