Where’s the soul?
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, Oct. 3, 2024 – The money-mad managers of the oxymoronic* consumer economy must be told, in no uncertain terms, what we, the American people, will allow them to do with A.I., an artificial thing. Artificial doesn’t mean fake, it means made by the hand of man, which means we must restrict deployment of it to situations where the human soul is irrelevant.

That is because, without a soul, there is no humanity. As artificial intelligence is the offspring of lab-based entrepreneurs, one presumes an artificial soul will be one of the first items to pop up in the a.i. after-market?
Until that pig gets its wings, any situation where the soul-borne concepts of honesty, justice, beauty, and equality are involved, must be protected from a.i., which will seek to replace honesty with the true-false binary, justice with the yes-no binary, beauty with the hot-not binary, and equality with equity.
As someone born to the namer’s trade, I suggest we name this leviathan, this new Frankenstein, by the hyphen demanded by good English, rather than by easy peasy initials, which only serve to mask its ugly nature. There ought to be a law to declare that any instance of artificial-intelligence within the context of any governmentally-sanctioned, licensed, taxed, or otherwise recognized use or concern must not be abbrieviated.
Already are people driven away from sanity by the real obnoxiousness of being made to hear all manner of b.s. whenever they try to talk to anybody besides a personal friend on the phone. That alone, is proof that state and federal office holders legislate on behalf of BigMed, BigBiz, and BigGov before you and me pop into their tidy little minds. That is why such outrages as Citizens United will never be overruled by Congress.
Anybody who believes the current mayor of New York is the only public official to build campaign wealth with taxpayer dollars equal to his/her pre-paid bribes is willfully blind, which is a polite way to identify a person as being artificially-stupid. To an artificially-intelligent money counter, and to a growing number of candidates, judges, and legislators, every dollar is as sweet as mother’s milk.
*Since the primary product of consumption is waste, only morons would build an economy on landfill. “Consumer economy” is fleece over eyes distracted since the managers of money off-shored manufacturing to slave states where labor leaders are ground into fine powder.