24A009.htm

"Artifical Intelligence" is said to be the great and scary wave of the future, possibly throwing tens of millions out of work and reducing humanity to the status of slaves. It's a dream coming true, for every aspiring Luddite.

I've not gone into it much, but this month I gave it a quick try; Microsoft repeated invitations to try "Copilot" and "ask it anything" so I did. I typed in the profoundly fundamental question "What is government for?"

Never having heard a coherent reply to that one from a real human, I waited a second or so in eager anticipation. Here's what Copilot told me.

Government is the system or group of people that governs an organized community, typically a state. It plays several crucial roles:

Enforcing Laws: Government ensures that laws are followed and enforced. It has the authority to create, modify, and enforce rules that govern behavior within the community.
Policy Determination: Government serves as a mechanism for determining policies. It decides on matters related to public welfare, defense, finance, and more.
Representation: In democratic systems, government represents the interests of the people. Elected officials make decisions on behalf of the population.
Social Welfare: Once appointed or formed, the government is responsible for social welfare, law and order, defense, and financial affairs of the country1.
System of Control: It ensures that the right to make laws and enforce them is vested in a particular group within society. Essentially, government provides a framework for social organization and stability.

I asked the question again in slightly different words (eg "Why have a government?") but the replies were all of the same ilk. Totally unintelligent.

That AI response accurately depicts what governments do. It fails completely to explain what their essential purpose is; what they are for.

"Enforcing laws"? - oh, yes. A bunch of thugs gets together and writes rules and forces everyone to obey them. Exactly like the Mafia, but more so. And why have laws, anyway?

"Determining policies"? - that too. But whoever said that a large set of people need to have a single "policy", one size fitting all?

"Social welfare"? - less accurate. Modern ones include that, but most in history have engaged in no such thing. '

And so on. A perfect representation of what government apologists say on the subject. Consult Wikipedia, expect to find much the same stuff. Copilot too delivers garbage - but yes, much faster.

Yet it has not repealed the Garbage In, Garbage Out principle discovered by the computer pioneers of 80 years ago: AI is still a machine; it cannot think.

AI is certainly artificial; it's mechanical, incredibly fast, deadly accurate in presenting what it finds. But "intelligent"? - I don't think so. To have that attribute it would have to do some original thinking, not just retrieving and spewing out what others have said and written about a subject. By all means call it a "Memory Monster" or "Fast Fetcher" or "Rapid Retriever" (with apologies to that breed of dog) but it's not at all as smart as its name implies.

In 2011 I watched the first Jeopardy program in which IBM's Watson took on and beat the astonishing champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. In fewer milliseconds than their minds needed, that AI computer analyzed the words of the question, dug into its massive archive of stored data, and produced the correct answer. Enormously impressive. But, original thought? No.

All that being so, AI has a sinister potential: it may greatly accelerate the process of indoctrination known as "schooling." Any student, given a question, may be able to toss it over to Copilot or Chat GPT or one of a few dozen others and get the "correct" authorized answer without have to stir a single neuron in his brain. Accordingly the already wide chasm between schooling and education (leading a student out, helping him THINK) could become as wide as the Grand Canyon.

The need to eliminate government schooling therefore becomes ever more urgent. And now that it has a taste for it, government is unlikely to let go of that powerful tool of control; so here is one more reason to eliminate government altogether.