Western writers whine a lot, don’t they?

I just want to take apart this piece of wallowing sophistry:

The mechanism seems to be this: When AI becomes more and more humanlike, people perceive the boundary between humans and machines as less distinct, and their judgments of the two move closer together. Because even highly humanlike AI is still seen as less fully human than an actual person, this can pull people’s judgments of other humans downward: as their perception of the machine’s humanness goes up, their perception of other people’s humanness goes down.

This is exactly the point that Seth, the neuroscientist, made separately: “If we confuse ourselves too readily with our machine creations, we not only overestimate them, we also underestimate ourselves.”

Folksy logic from 2022. I take enterprise webinars in AI; believe me, no one talking about prompts and text or image generation. That’s middle class people obsession because learning about AI is very hard for them.

Mr. Brooks is stuck in 2022

As AI gets better and better, we’ll probably spend more time talking with it—and, because there are a finite number of hours in the day, less time talking with people. AI will seem smarter, more supportive, and more controllable than many of our friends and lovers. Humans are mimetic creatures. You don’t have to be a member of the René Girard cult to believe that we’ll begin to assimilate AI ways of thinking. A lot of people already think the human mind works like a computer, even though it doesn’t. A lot of people already believe all thinking is computation, even though it isn’t. Research led by Adriana Salatino and Arthur Prével found that AI bots are influential when co-working with humans in morally challenging situations (making them more aggressive or more passive depending on how the AI is trained).

Actually, AI can go way beyond this and can quantify primal, emotional, and analytical thinking and can vet for gaps and contradictions. I have been making programs for journalists to do precisely that: it flags gaps and conflicts in information, but it is up to the journalist to work it would. It is no different than a teacher marking your paper: you get the grade, but what you have to do in order to do better in the next assignment is up to you.

It’s useful to think of AI as a swarm of evangelical missionaries who have come into our world to convert us to their worldview. I suspect they’re going to have a big effect on how we unconsciously process reality. For example, there is a long-running debate between people whose moral beliefs are based on consequentialism and those who operate by a different moral philosophy. Consequentialism in its raw form is the belief that moral actions can be judged solely on the basis of their outcomes. You reduce utility to a single scale of value and then you calculate which actions produce the most good and the least bad. AIs, which are trained to seek rewards, are consequentialist. The moral reasoning you saw the AI bots doing inside the chat rooms? That’s pure consequentialism.

Actually, it is better to think of AI as an ever-evolving Swiss Army Knife or expert. You can train AI work with data only. This complaint is just silly and without evidence.

Sophistry reared its ugly head here, too:

Most of us base our morality on love and care or some other ethical system, not the cold calculation of pure consequentialism. If you killed somebody in order to harvest their organs and save five other lives, most of us would consider that repulsive. If a house was on fire and you could save only one person from it, a brilliant heart surgeon or your wife, we would find it repulsive if you saved the surgeon because he could produce the most social good.

If that was true, we wouldn’t have crime or people diagnosed as psychopaths, sociopaths, and narcissists. People vote for liars and psychopaths ten times out of time, and then clutch their pearls when the predators they unleashed on others turn on them. The entire modern political system is build on wife-beater logic and corporations treat workers like livestock. We have homeless on the street, people trafficking children, serial killers, and corruption, and when someone like Julian Assange naively thinks exposing the rot will bring civic uprising and change, he gets confined, abused, and silenced. Middle class people don’t want to hear that their world is with flaw, or that they had a hand in making it a mess.

However, this paragraph is a real knee-slapper:

AI seems to assimilate people into consequentialism. The tech community is already filled with consequentialists, especially within the effective-altruism movement, which is an attempt to build a morality without love. If AI subtly does that to the rest of us, it will hollow out many of the traits that seem most beautifully human—including our ability to care about the people closest to us. If we turn our spiritual, moral, and emotional lives into a process of calculation, then we will have made ourselves more robotlike.

People were always sheeple. They were assimilated a long time ago, and agreed to be treated as corporate livestock for decades. Don’t blame AI just because you’re mentally inert.

I also found this passage to be hilarious:

Believe it or not, I am not an AI doomer. I like talking to Claude. I’m excited about all of the breakthroughs AI will make possible. But my interest is in how AI will change humans. I suspect that over the next few years, because of our tendency to anthropomorphize, we will feel more affection than we should for our personal agents, while offering less admiration than we should to our fellow humans. People often say technology is dehumanizing; now we’re getting a better sense of the etiology of how that works.

No, David Brooks is an AI Doomer who, like all AI Doomers, is pathetically AI illiterate. He still thinks AI is a vending machine and is all about text and image generation. This isn’t 2022, Mr. Brooks. Why haven’t you progressed to using AI to vet your article for logical and factual holes? How about ask if you, you know, need actual studies and research to write this article?

And even that is child’s play level.

AI can do amazing things other than amuse you. Try them before you cry in your laptop, thank you.