An Adobe commercial where human relationships still remain central.
This is a rather light-hearted commentary for such a serious subject. In fact, it is accompanied by a Video below not of the doomsayers of the past few days, but of three of my favorite AI commercials put out by Adobe Acrobat. I just enjoy these, and I’m no shill for Adobe. I think I have the Foxit pdf reader on my computer, not Adobe. The Video, though, touches on one of the major fault lines of the AI debate. When AI is seen as an assistant to humans, all seems well, but the assistance can all too easily take over the human, and for the last several days that take-over has come to mean not just losing what we’ve seen as central human skills and qualities, not just losing jobs, but humanity being literally wiped out by AI gone rogue or AI used to make and direct things—like biological agents—that could kill off humans entirely. In a recent concert, comedian Jerry Seinfeld said, “Well, we just started with plain old human intelligence and that’s not worked out so well, so now we’re trying out Artificial Intelligence to see how that goes.”
The three videos I’ve combined into one below end with AI as clearly in the assistant mode, with human relationships still commanding center stage in the last of the three. The other two, though, I don’t know, especially in the second video where we’re at least on the verge of a more total takeover, where the humans are in stupefied wonder at how much better AI makes their work than they ever could. Researcher Jacob Coxon has warned that AI could wipe us out in a decade, and Elon Musk and Sam Altman (OpenAI’s CEO) agree with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s call to slow AI development. The talk over the next few months will be on creating safeguards, rails, to more robustly contain and direct the development and deployment of AI. Much of this will involve complex technical matters of the utmost importance. We will be talking, too, of having to go world-wide with this effort—especially forming an understanding with China. I hope we will also continue talking about ethics, about how important it will remain to integrate morality and ethics into our technology—or the other way around, as it probably should always have been. An ethical upgrade should probably be the thing we integrate our technological upgrades in to.
In a previous article, “Whales and An Ethic for the Age of AI,” I suggest ways we can begin considering an ethical upgrade. It all hinges on staying embedded in the real, as opposed to the virtual world. Lately I’ve been reading and re-reading Ada Limon’s poem “In Praise of Mystery,” written for NASA’s Europa Clipper, launched towards Jupiter’s second moon in 2024. The poem is engraved in her own handwriting on the space craft’s vault plate. “Still,” she writes, “there are mysteries below our sky: / the whale song, the songbird singing / its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.” It’s not the darkness of space that unites us “…but / the offering of water, each drop of rain, / each rivulet, each pulse, each vein” because “…we, too, are made / of water, of vast and beckoning seas.” Stay in touch with such things and it might possibly work out.
AI and Humanity’s End
An Adobe commercial where human relationships still remain central.
This is a rather light-hearted commentary for such a serious subject. In fact, it is accompanied by a Video below not of the doomsayers of the past few days, but of three of my favorite AI commercials put out by Adobe Acrobat. I just enjoy these, and I’m no shill for Adobe. I think I have the Foxit pdf reader on my computer, not Adobe. The Video, though, touches on one of the major fault lines of the AI debate. When AI is seen as an assistant to humans, all seems well, but the assistance can all too easily take over the human, and for the last several days that take-over has come to mean not just losing what we’ve seen as central human skills and qualities, not just losing jobs, but humanity being literally wiped out by AI gone rogue or AI used to make and direct things—like biological agents—that could kill off humans entirely. In a recent concert, comedian Jerry Seinfeld said, “Well, we just started with plain old human intelligence and that’s not worked out so well, so now we’re trying out Artificial Intelligence to see how that goes.”
The three videos I’ve combined into one below end with AI as clearly in the assistant mode, with human relationships still commanding center stage in the last of the three. The other two, though, I don’t know, especially in the second video where we’re at least on the verge of a more total takeover, where the humans are in stupefied wonder at how much
better AI makes their work than they ever could. Researcher Jacob Coxon has warned that AI could wipe us out in a decade, and Elon Musk and Sam Altman (OpenAI’s CEO) agree with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s call to slow AI development. The talk over the next few months will be on creating safeguards, rails, to more robustly contain and direct the development and deployment of AI. Much of this will involve complex technical matters of the utmost importance. We will be talking, too, of having to go world-wide with this effort—especially forming an understanding with China. I hope we will also continue talking about ethics, about how important it will remain to integrate morality and ethics into our technology—or the other way around, as it probably should always have been. An ethical upgrade should probably be the thing we integrate our technological upgrades in to.
In a previous article, “Whales and An Ethic for the Age of AI,” I suggest ways we can begin considering an ethical upgrade. It all hinges on staying embedded in the real, as opposed to the virtual world. Lately I’ve been reading and re-reading Ada Limon’s poem “In Praise of Mystery,” written for NASA’s Europa Clipper, launched towards Jupiter’s second moon in 2024. The poem is engraved in her own handwriting on the space craft’s vault plate. “Still,” she writes, “there are mysteries below our sky: / the whale song, the songbird singing / its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.” It’s not the darkness of space that unites us “…but / the offering of water, each drop of rain, / each rivulet, each pulse, each vein” because “…we, too, are made / of water, of vast and beckoning seas.” Stay in touch with such things and it might possibly work out.