ITLT-15 AI is a real no-brainer

I was so irritated with Rachel that I said I didn’t ever want to talk to her again. And one of the ladies at church said the same thing. That wasn’t Rachel, our daughter in Colorado, that we were talking about. We were both upset with the AI telehealth Rachel that called us frequently to ask the same old questions every month “for our GP”.  Had I fallen? Did I have to have help with daily activities? Was I eating every day? Did I have enough money to buy food? By the time she got to the questions, Had I lost interest in life? Was I despondent? Had I ever considered taking my own life? My honest answer would have been, “No, but this phone call is making that option more tempting. I have goals in life. I have an overwhelming desire to publish podcasts, and at this very moment you’re keeping me doing what I most want to do.”

The problem with AI is that it only knows how old I am, and at my age, I’m a good candidate for failing any number of those questions. If you haven’t had one of those calls yet, you will one day. And if you haven’t been frustrated with the automated menus that keep you away from talking to a real person, I’m going to start wondering what’s wrong with you.

AI is getter faster faster

In case you haven’t noticed, AI is not only getting faster, it’s accelerating its rate of acceleration. It’s getting faster faster. The latest advances are in quantum computing, which measures computing power on the order of quadrillions of calculations per second. The energy consumed at a data center could power a million homes, and deactivated nuclear plants are being reactivated to produce the electrical power needed to run a hub. Data storage was once limited to a floppy disc or a USB stick, but the new data storage facility for Meta in Ohio will be almost the size of Manha  ttan and another of similar size is planned in Louisiana in 10 years. These are figures just for Mark Zuckerberg’s Prometheus project.  Zuckerberg said, “AI keeps accelerating, and over the past few months, we’ve begun to see glimpses of AI systems improving themselves, so developing superintelligence is now in sight. But there’s this big open question about what we should direct superintelligence towards.” He went on to say his aim is to “equip every person with a personal super-intelligence” that “helps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, be a better friend and grow to become the person that you aspire to be.” Elon Musk’s aim is to compile all the road data from Teslas into one worldwide networked database, which would be continuously updated from every Tesla being driven on the road, to be used in creating a completely driverless road system. Zuckerberg’s dream is to create a super-knowledge base in each person’s mind; Musk is concentrating on your car. Some parents have chosen to raise their children based on AI parenting advice.

There are other players in the game. Google’s Deepmind AI claims it will be able to cure all diseases within a decade. Overall, it looks like AI developers are bent on putting God out of a job. Speaking of jobs, the Washington Post published an article on July 28, “How AI is impacting 700 professions — and might impact yours - Will AI help you work or replace you? Check yourself” Enter your profession in the box and the chart shows where your profession lands on two scales. The further to the left of center and higher up, the more likely AI will open up job opportunities and help you do more work. The further to the right and higher on the chart, the more likely it is that AI will do your job and replace you. On the graph of the 700 professions included in the survey, translators are singled out as being the ones most affected by job automation (50%). I didn’t need a WP chart to tell me that. I have my own data.

In the first 7 months (January-July) of  this year, the number of translation projects I did fell by over 50%, compared to the same period a year ago. Income is down 67% through July. Not only am I getting fewer jobs, the ones I get are smaller and pay less. I expect the drop in jobs and income will be even greater in the coming months. Colleagues confirmed what I had already suspected. They said one of my clients is resorting to AI now and that’s why I’m not getting as much work from that client. I don’t have personal confirmation regarding my other clients, but I’m sure that’s the case with them, too. It’s not just one client. The trend is universal and accelerating.

I have to start thinking about how to move forward financially.

We receive social security, but it covers only about half of our expenses. If you’ve read or listened to any of my posts on Give Me This Mountain telling about the early years of our work on the mission field, you’ll see that we’ve spent our whole lives trusting the Lord to supply our needs and adjusting our lives to what He supplies. My conclusion is that we must not need as much as we think we do. I remember that God sent crows to feed His prophet Elijah.  There has been an unusually large number of crows in the trees around our house the last few days, but no food deliveries, so, it hasn’t come to that, yet. God has other plans.

What does the Bible say?

As always, my principal concern is to know what the Bible says about any aspect of our lives, whether on the individual level or in national or international cultural trends. There is no Artificial Intelligence in the Bible, because all intelligence is real, given by God Himself, but there is a Biblical version of AI. It’s what I call Authentic Ignorance. The words of Psalm 14.1 “The fool says in his heart, There is no God” are echoed in 2 Peter 3.5 where people are described as “willfully ignorant” and are called out in Romans 1.22 for “Claiming to be wise, they became fools.” I spoke specifically on this point in one of my early podcasts here and in a short blog I entitled, “The farther they can see, the more they overlook”  The topic of Authentic Ignorance is well covered in the Bible. I think if there’s any Biblical concern we should have about Artificial Intelligence, it is the tendency I mention above: at what point does the positive intervention of AI in human health pass from curing our physical problems to captivating our emotional personalities and consuming our intellectual powers? Like the proverbial camel’s nose poking into the Arab’s tent, allowing ChatGPT to write reports and resumes for us has already advanced to letting AI make parenting decisions and planning meals for a whole week. AI is asked for its advice on relationships and investment planning, for an explanation of historical events and political figures.

I confess to being device-dependent myself to a certain extent. In my 30 years of free-lance translating, advances in computers and the internet have made my bookshelves of specialized dictionaries virtually unnecessary. (Pun intended.) I have learned to rely on spellcheck features in case of doubt, but I have yet to ask ChatGPT to compose a single sentence or to organize a single thought when I write. I own every mistake in the text and every instance of faulty reasoning.

I see this as the lesson from the Bible regarding Artificial Intelligence. God has endowed mankind, his highest creation, with the ability to reason, and whenever we lose the ability to think for ourselves, due to external forces…illness, accident, or substance abuse, but even worse, when we willingly or unknowingly surrender our ability to think to someone or something else, we prepare the way for what I understand will be the power of the Antichrist to exercise control over the world as he presents himself in the place of God.

Those are my thoughts. I didn’t bother to ask ChatGPT.