David Brooks, "Our Machine Masters": Getting His Underpants in a Knot Over A.I.

There are so many scary things to worry about in this world, e.g., Ebola, ISIS and the abnegation of leadership in Washington. So what worries David Brooks? Artificial intelligence, of course. In his latest New York Times op-ed entitled "Our Machine Masters," Brooks suggests two competing future A.I. scenarios:

"In the humanistic one, machines liberate us from mental drudgery so we can focus on higher and happier things. In this future, differences in innate I.Q. are less important. Everybody has Google on their phones so having a great memory or the ability to calculate with big numbers doesn’t help as much."

or

"In the cold, utilitarian future, on the other hand, people become less idiosyncratic. If the choice architecture behind many decisions is based on big data from vast crowds, everybody follows the prompts and chooses to be like each other. The machine prompts us to consume what is popular, the things that are easy and mentally undemanding."

The reality, as noted by Brooks, is that A.I. has already been with us for quite some time: computerized chess software, the selection of music compatible to individual taste, and automatic pilot devices intended to guide airplanes through the sky.

Can A.I. ultimately guide human beings through their lives? I suppose that would depend upon whether someone is capable of turning off her/his own automatic pilot system and switching to manual control during times of crisis or otherwise.

Like it or not, we have all been programmed by a set of childhood experiences, many of them destructive.

Another example of A.I. currently affecting our lives? High-frequency trading. Imagine, however, competing trading systems, all "motivated" by greed, which can set in motion panic, upon which they can feed. When economies fail as a consequence, will another machine be asked to clean up the mess, or will human beings be forced to intervene and create new rules governing the use of such systems?

I still see a place for human leadership, or guidance, if you will. Unless the president decides that he is too busy playing golf and traveling to California to be told by Gwyneth Paltrow that "You’re so handsome that I can’t speak properly."

Maureen Dowd, "Silicon Valley Sharknado": Are You Afraid of AI?

Maureen Dowd begins her latest New York Times op-ed entitled "Silicon Valley Sharknado" (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/09/opinion/maureen-dowd-silicon-valley-sharknado.html?ref=opinion&_r=0) by whimsically observing, "Mostly, this July, I’m worrying about the jumping sharks jumping the shark." Dowd then segues into a discussion of her angst involving "rampaging robots." Dowd writes:

"In a recent interview with CNBC, Elon Musk, the C.E.O. of Tesla Motors and Space X, which hopes to rocket us to other planets, said he invests in artificial intelligence companies not to make money but to 'keep an eye' on them in case of 'scary outcomes,' like a 'Terminator' scenario of psychopathic robots that could chase us off the Earth and up to Mars.

. . . .

Ray Kurzweil, Google’s 66-year-old director of engineering, is running a Manhattan project to push A.I. to match human intelligence by 2029 and achieve his vision of 'the singularity' — the moment when computers overtake human brains — by 2045. The robots will even be able to flirt, he says, and, unlike Siri and Scarlett Johansson in 'Her,' they can easily have a curvy virtual form and be 'lovable.'"

Artificial intelligence? How wonderful that Maureen has something to worry about. Me? Last night, warning sirens began to blare in my neighborhood after Hamas launched a Syrian-made 302-mm Khaibar-1 missile at Hadera.

But seriously, what about AI? Quite honestly, I am willing to forgo driving in traffic jams and be whisked by a robot from destination to destination. Or, could it be that I will have no more meetings to attend?

No more meetings to attend? No problemo. I can busy myself planting tomatoes in my backyard, or, will my tomatoes also be sown by a machine?

Of course, there's always my blog! Thank goodness for that! I can still rise every morning before dawn and type a few words, unless of course, a computer can digest all of the world's news and mimic my thought processes.

Worried. Not really. You see, there are still all those millions of jihadists intent on freezing our thought processes in the seventh century, and my bet is that they will ultimately get the better of the machines. But not these jihadists, who attempted to attack Israel from the sea yesterday (this is real footage, not Hollywood):