The central villain of this year’s biggest summer film, Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1, is an AI algorithm. Indicating that the world’s biggest movie star fears that his character, Ethan Hunt, will be replaced by code written by a 23-year-old San Jose-based Telegu python specialist called Gurupally S.
Chats – real human ones, the last breed – are rife with what kind of jobs and things AI will replace. Definitely, the school and college essay, where the expectation is structuring a logical cold argument. Already, at a bunch of academic institutions in India, people have been caught cheating using ChatGPT. I am sure the same thing is happening with office presentations, maybe legal briefs, old men’s political speeches – although this is an area where AI can probably sound more real than a human being.
Nobody will put in the rigour when a shortcut is an option. (Just ask Lance Armstrong or Australian cricketers.) Why would people need critical thinking as a life skill when code can do it for you?
When not boring you with columns like this, I do a comedy podcast with the Bollywood actor Kunal Roy Kapoor. We ask each other questions about the moral dilemmas of the week gone by. A wayside chat. Recently, for fun, we asked ChatGPT to write the chat Kunal and I would have on the podcast. And we did upload that exact ChatGPT chat without telling our listeners. The feedback we got from one listener was, ‘You both have changed. Where’s the wickedness? I can’t explain, but I feel betrayed.’ The fundamental argument people had against ChatGPT in comedy was that it was ‘too nice’.
Sure, currently, all AI sounds like they are 15th century servants. But it is only a matter of time before there’s an AI Lenin shooting a czar in the head. Sundar Pichai, the world’s best-known Indian after wrestler Dara Singh, recently said that AI, or the discovery of what ‘intelligence’ is, is the world’s greatest discovery, after fire and electricity. And that’s why Google is a great company. Because in my 47 years, I haven’t discovered any sign of intelligence on this planet, either from me or anyone I’ve encountered. Especially those the world claims as intelligent. I had a Bengali uncle, a DPhil from Oxford, whose greatest dream was not in his Padma Shri-McKinsey partner status, but to throw a rubber ball, skim a pile of stones and be adjudged champion of The Ballygunge Pitthu Cup — not a recognised world sport, I know, which is only played in his tiny Kolkata neighbourhood by his wastrel ex-Naxalite neighbours — after controversially being disqualified by area hooligans in his teen years.
So, I’m glad some Silicon Valley people have figured out a code that’s cleverer than us. And given that ‘intelligence’ needs to be more than just Google engineers, Pichai has kindly suggested philosophers, economists, Barack Obama et al to contribute, so that his Google chat doesn’t just have the intelligence of Telugu coder Gurupally S, but also, I presume, Aristotle and Sherlock Holmes.
My only argument – other than to wait and watch till I become just a string of numbers – is not that AI needs to be good, but that it needs to come in when humans don’t want to do human things. Like admitting to their partner they’ve cheated, going shopping with the mother-in-law, meeting tax authorities to explain why the receipts are missing…
Nothing good can come of intelligence if not used when we need to be bad.
