Any intelligence is good. If you do not have natural intelligence, then artificial; if you do not have organic intelligence, then synthetic. But any intelligence is good if it is intelligence. Suppose the walls in your house turned out to be intelligent ones, is it not fantastic? The only thing is, if they get smarter than you, you may feel a little insecure! Otherwise, having a lot of intelligent things around you is a great blessing. Sadhguru (link)
One of the problems with news and information, at least from a journalistic point-of-view, is that good news doesn’t sell. The flood of my information input, tuned by my constant feedback of likes, dislikes, and source choices, has turned into a never ending stream of dire consequences and “the sky is falling” scenarios. I’m perfectly aware that this has happened, that I’m stuck in silo, a rut of information. And it is easy to forget just how negative everything has become. It isn’t only my chosen media, but major media. Pick up any magazine or newspaper, and over and over are predictions on the coming AI apocalypse: humans replaced by robots, our jobs replaced by algorithms, uncontrollable intelligence that deems humans a nuisance to be fixed in some way, killer robots out of control. The list goes on and on, only limited in scenarios and terrible consequences by the writer’s imagination. In my IEEE / ACM journals there are sober discussions on why these predictions are wrong but they don’t carry the same hysteria as the MSM. Is it possible that I’m only getting the negative data? Maybe. The recent AI Index report stated that 28% of all AI articles were positive and only 5% were negative, though it is a black box as to how they reached that conclusion (I guess that means all the other articles were of neutral sentiment). I’m curious exactly what those bots were reading.
Of course, innately we all understand these “worse case scenarios”. It is human nature to think the worse. It is unavoidable. We’re trained at an early age to “think critically” which many people conflate as being negative – a negative comment is the same thing as a critical comment. In a management development course I participated in (led by the very talented Robert Hersowitz), one of the hardest changes to ingest into my being was the “praise sandwich”. If you need to critique or give negative feedback, do it in a positive – negative – positive dialog. It’s easy to find fault. It takes twice as much energy to really think of the positive. And doing so helps put your feelings in check, and for me at least it helps with my empathy toward the person I’m addressing. Obviously these positive-negative-positive ideas don’t exist in the news we read. That's not considered “critical” thinking.
Often I find myself working on a problem and then one of these negative prophecies pops into my head and just makes me depressed. Deep down I know that I don’t want any of these terrible things that are being predicted. Dire predictions are so common and so wrong so often that I should be immune to them by now. As a child of the 70’s I’ve been subjected to predictions of a world torn asunder by various doomsdays: over population, running out commodities, running out of food, running out of oil, the disappear of the ground soil leading to famine, global cooling (yes, before global warming we worried about global cooling), chemicals in our environment… Again, the list goes on and on. Which is why it was so refreshing to read that small blog entry from Sadhguru. I’m not endorsing Sadhguru. I don’t know a thing about him, other than his link came from somebody I respect. I like the entry because his perspective on AI is positive. He is choosing to be positive. Kudos to him! Perhaps his technical perspective may be superficial and his writing is from a spiritual knowledge which is outside of my experience but it was a breath of fresh air to think about how great things could be. And I think we all need a little bit more of that.