*Warning, dripping sarcasm ahead*

There is no other mind like your mind. Did you know that? Perhaps you’ve never thought of it in those terms, but it’s true.

Whatever your frame of belief, you were given a unique origin point in this life. Born as all humans are and from that starting point, you developed a unique individuality. There is no one else with a mind like yours. That is one of the blessings of being human, we are born with a mind to cultivate, protect and through which to be productive.

This is why I object to Artificial Intelligence applications outside of calculations (and even there, I’m not in unalloyed favor). Specifically, I object to written applications that mimic the compositions that should be the work of a unique human mind after proper education and digestion of information. Human reason.

Job displacement aside, which, historically speaking, has come with every “innovation” in technology through the millennia, to surrender your unique human mind to a fancy algorithm that extracts, swirls, and regurgitates all the thematic written material on a given topic is to diminish and demean that unique gift. (College students and professional plagiarists, I’m looking at you here.)

Could it be useful in collating information? Yes, probably, but so is a keenly cultivated human mind. Ask the librarians of old who could direct you to shelf, book, and page on a given topic. By the way, we don’t even begin to push to the limits of what our intellect and memory can do. One of the side-effects of the advance of digital technology is to deactivate human mental capacity.

Some have argued that AI and robotics are the future. A few starry-eyed digital darlings have nodded their heads in sycophantic admiration, but let’s examine the tenuous undergirdings of that robotic AI monolith. Garbage in, garbage out. A system that was predominantly developed by individuals of questionable virtue for purposes of war, and into which is fed the outpourings of humanity, written, audio, video, and mathematical, a humanity that I might mention has brought us the current climate of conflict, war, menace, greed, and would-be totalitarianism in which we now live, is going to produce an idealistic, utopian existence for humanity into the future?

Surely, you jest?

To my readers who are fans of the digital delights, I suspect I have annoyed you. Good, that shows that you are using your unique mind enough to disagree with me. Please continue to use your mind, don’t absolutely defer to technology.

To my readers who agree with me, thanks guys, but don’t take it for granted.

Often noted, in my reading on AI, is that while it is “almost perfect” enough to displace all and sundry human data center employees, content and copy writers, etc., it still requires “significant human oversight because AI generated content often contains errors”. Ya think?

Question: what is required of humans in order to detect the frequent errors in AI generated content?

Um, a unique and highly cultivated human mind that is familiar with a wide range of topics. So, in order to avoid becoming a human lemming led over the cliff by the AI pied piper (see, if you don’t recognize that I cited there, you need to look up “medieval fables and moralistic stories”), you still have to go to school, read things written by historical humanity (in order to detect the AI errors). You just can’t get off the hook and curl up in your human sized doggy bed waiting for the coming digital Utopia. Bummer, I know. (Pardon, while I wipe the sarcasm from off my screen.)

AI tends to compound human error. How do I know this? Because when enough people misspell something on Microsoft Word, it becomes an accepted common spelling of a given word and the program stops flagging it. This is a very rudimentary flaw, but you can imagine that it can be compounded as AI ventures into more complex concepts.

Are there arguments in favor of AI?

Yes, but that’s not the bone I’m chewing on today. I want you to walk into the future with shields up and sensors on “detect” (see, I can do tech-y Trekkie, too) for what is going to become an increasingly complex, and murky world full of falsehoods and fakes. Keep your unique mind activated, develop your critiquing skills and always ask the questions: Am I reading what a human individual has thought through and produced, or mere digital regurgitation? And then, is this really true?

*Note, the above was decidedly not written by or in any way AI generated.

Keep thinking history.