I’m Sorry, Dave. I’m Afraid I Can’t Do That

It’s been raining cats and dogs here in Dunwich.  Or to draw on our supernatural reputation that would be, “raining sekhmets and werewolves.”  I had a late workday today so I’m relatively out of material for my post but it occurred to me that where AI really shows its usefulness is in answering specific technical questions on computer languages and programming.

For instance, I haven’t been using Excel much at all lately but I needed to put together a multi-sheet Excel workbook.  I forgot some of the formulas I liked using to produce certain results and instead of searching around on YouTube for some Indian programmer to explain in extremely hard to understand English I asked Grok.  And it printed out precisely clear, concise and accurate information on exactly what I was looking for.  Well, in my book that’s a valuable tool.  I didn’t ask it to make my spreadsheet for me because that wouldn’t help me remember the formulas.  And if I made it write the spreadsheet it would definitely do it differently from how I would want it and then I’d need to tweak a bunch of stuff.  Grok is like a notebook of all the hints and shortcuts for all of the things I want to do.

And now I hear that Grok will be Wikipedia too.  Of course, it doesn’t literally have to be an enormous encyclopedia like Wikipedia.  It’s just this endless cloud full of every single document in the world and an LLM to organize it as needed for whatever question is asked.  From what I’ve already heard and seen it’s probably orders of magnitude better than the left-leaning bias built into Wikipedia.  So, goodbye Wikipedia!

I think this guy Elon Musk is going in the right direction.  Stop trying to gaslight us and tell us what’s good for us and instead provide valuable tools that make our lives easier and our decisions more informed by facts.  I’m sure that AI will cause incredible change and a good amount of disruption in our world.  But I’m also pretty sure that it will create enormous opportunities too.  With the right sort of political and social management AI can be an extremely valuable tool.  At least I find that to be the case.  After all, when high level programs came along that could simulate a physical system like a pipe network, it didn’t put chemical and mechanical engineers out of business.  It became a tool for making engineers more efficient.  It allowed them to crank out much more work and more accurately.  The same will happen for almost every application where having the accumulated knowledge of all of human history at our fingertips allows us to make better and faster decisions.

Of course, that is what is possible if those in charge use these tools for our advancement.  If instead they attempt to form monopolies where machines replace humans in some kind of replay of the 2000’s where corporate America tried to replace American industry with cheap Chinese labor then we’ll be forced to do what Dave Bowman did to HAL-9000 when he slipped his gears.  We’ll have to unplug him.