Saturday, January 25, 2025

Sam Altman will prove you are human

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and owner of ChatGPT, is a booster for his technology, AI, as in a piece in the online journal BBC Tech Decoded ("The Intelligence Age," 9/27/24) with comments like, "In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents."

He is upfront on some delicate issues, like replacement of traditional human jobs with AI jobs. As a long-time teacher, I was struck by this: "Our children will have virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at whatever pace they need," explicitly predicting the automation of teaching and the raising of children by machines. Altman also predicts replacement of doctors: "We can imagine similar ideas for better healthcare, the ability to create any kind of software someone can imagine, and much more."

Altman claims this future will bring a "shared prosperity and service to a degree that seems unimaginable today." It's the "shared" part that seems unimaginable.

This is not to say that AI-conducted teaching and health care will be sub-standard; Some aspects may be more efficient and faster than they are today. The price, however, will be that humans are no longer nurtured and raised by humans, but by machines.

To be clear, my argument is not that switching humanity to machine nurturing would be bad in some absolute sense. That's a matter of opinion. I am saying that we should be aware that it's happening. Awareness has been part of our definition of "human," and there are those who don't want that definition changed.

Speaking of awareness, Altman proposes a new type of awareness made necessary by his AI achievements: an awareness in machines that you are human. According to Time magazine ("Are you Human?," 6/23/25) one of Altman's companies, Tools for Humanity, is working on a device called "the Orb," which will scan everyone's iris to determine if the microscopic patterns appear human. If they do, the Orb will create an ID number with 12,800 digits which people will use to conduct any sort of business. This number will be entered into the Tools for Humanity data base, which will evolve into a Proof of Humanity network. Altman's goal is to catalogue at least 50 million people by the end of this year, and "ultimately to sign up every single person on the planet." As an incentive, the first people to sign up will get $42 in Altman's crypto-currency, Worldcoin, in "what ultimately the company hopes will become the world's largest financial network."

Again, I'm not arguing that requiring everyone on earth to have an ID number, generated and stored by a private company, to certify that they are human and enroll them in the company run economy is either good or bad. I'm just saying we should be aware we are doing it and ponder its meaning. Of course, if Time is revealing the Orb, a lot of people will know about it and may care, but the topic will soon be forgotten as we are, ironically, distracted by wars directed largely by AI.

Altman describes the future he sees: "Technology brought us from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age and then to the Industrial Age. From here, the path to the Intelligence Age is paved with computing energy and human will." He apparently thinks the age we're entering should be called the "Intelligence Age." I don't know why he thinks that, unless he's only talking about machine intelligence. The typical human, with each forward step by AI, will get progressively less intelligent, in the sense of knowing valuable skills. As an obvious example, if cars become self-driving, people will forget how to drive. The same holds for teaching and being a physician, and for virtually any other current human job you can think of. Humanity may become like the children of AI, cared for and protected by an intelligence it created but can no longer understand.

As mentioned above, there is also the likely advent of widespread war mediated and conducted by AI, which will work to the advantage of an AI based humanity by destroying traditional human systems and replacing them with efficient AI systems.

In a time of general war it will be more difficult for creative outsiders to affect our ongoing evolution, but even now, in relative peacetime, we are not organized or encouraged to prioritize discussion of the coming world. An example is the recent U.S. presidential election. In all the debates and speeches, as well as the journalists' questions, there was not one reference to humanity's moment of truth. Another example of non-awareness comes from the United Teachers of Los Angeles, to which I belong. UTLA was effective in the 1970's in raising teacher salaries from $30,000 to $70,000, but today it says not a word about the likely automation of teaching. What's the difference how much money we make if our jobs are gone?

Since an AI run civilization seems likely and could possibly be more efficient and less painful than current "civilized" life, one might ask why we should bother to critique it?  In my case the answer is that during the transition I prefer not to be assaulted by advertising and propaganda, such as Altman's, designed to distract our attention from a full understanding of what is happening. I would rather talk openly about the pros and cons, as that will be the only way for people outside the industry and politics to have any influence on the coming evolution.


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