Plausible From One Angle

Dearest Rachel –

It may not seem like it, since I’ve been able to contact you every day with some news or other, but there’s been a limited amount of stuff going on for me to tell you about. The fact that I can write to you at all has more to do with being able to take a single topic – a sliver of the day, or the previous day – and expand upon it to the point where the essay has sufficient heft to be worth sending to you. And to be fair, there are more than a few such slivers that I can focus on in any given day to hopefully keep you interested in what’s been going on around here with me.

But there’s a large chunk of how I spend my day – particularly at the ‘office’ – researching projects that I can’t say that I feel comfortable telling you about until such time as I can produce results. It’s one thing to tell you about the fits and starts in my attempts at dating, for instance; those misadventures aren’t entirely under my control, and some of the failures (such as discovering about ‘pig-butchering’ and other such scams) have provided valuable lessons. Such things are worth telling about, even if they don’t pan out; indeed, the collapses are the sort of misadventures that make for some of the best stories.

But when it comes to using artificial intelligence, and whether it will accomplish what I want it to, it feels like I have to have something put together before I can really tell you about it. Essentially, I have to have experience with it before I tell you about my experiences with it. If nothing else, it’s hard to describe what I’m trying to do; it would easier to explain once I’ve done something with it, and can point to that and say “this is a step in the direction I’m trying to go.”

Granted, I suppose I’ve written to you about a few such concepts in the past, but talk is cheap; I’m getting tired of saying I’ll do this or that thing, and never produce anything. At least with the AI art journey, I’ve actually come up with results I could show you, although I’ve set it aside for long periods of time, simply because I’ve been stymied as to where to go from here on that. So for all of the study I’ve been doing over the past couple of weeks, I’ve decided to hold off on writing you about it until I could point to some actual progress; which, seeing as it’s the weekend, is not going to be made any time soon. Even now, when I don’t really put in actual ‘work’ at the ‘office,’ the weekends are still for disconnecting from all that for a while.

But the topic continues to swirl around me, even as I may put my own efforts into figuring out how to use it on hold for a couple of days. It’s a discussion point that seems to capture more and more people’s attention – and, to a large extent, is devoid of the political substance that drives rifts between people these days that I try to avoid. Here the debate boils down to various binaries – is it good or bad? A tool that will improve humanity’s lot, or hasten its slide into indolence and poverty? – which people on either side of the political fence can see and agree (or disagree) with.

For now, most of the answers boil down to “it’s too soon to tell.” Predictions are hard, I’ve been told, especially about the future. Based on what I hear and read about, it could go either way. For my own part, I can certainly see a holodeck-style future, where we can amuse ourselves indefinitely without human contact; the AI personae we build to interact with becomes a simulacrum that is easier (and safer, in some ways) to deal with than other real humans. Although the sci-fi world of, say, Black Mirror’s ‘Be Right Back’ is still a long way off, we’re already there to some extent, with everybody already having their noses buried in their phones for what seems like their entire waking lives – and the fact that I’m writing this to you over the internet goes to show that I know whereof I speak; I’ve got this plank in my eye as I decry other’s specks.

At the same time, while it seems plausible from one angle, I think there might be only so far we can go with it (and I’m not even talking about the hypothetical ‘singularity,’ where robots become sentient on top of being more intelligent than humans, and decide to eliminate humanity as an ‘inferior’ species. If nothing else, there’s a certain absurdity to that fear, insofar as there are numerous other ‘inferior’ species on this earth; why leave those alone to attack the ones closest to them?). Maybe it’s because I have a specific idea in mind, but I can’t quite bring myself to believe that we can fool ourselves into accepting the artificial intelligences as being truly ‘real,’ any more than we can tickle ourselves, or hypnotize ourselves. At some point, you drop the coin, and the spell breaks before you can completely go under.

Maybe it has to do with the uncanny valley – although I think we’ll figure out how to overcome that at some point. On the other hand, it may be that the uncanny valley isn’t the real problem. Allow me to offer up an illustration from an older anime that better explains why I don’t think we have to fear this for while to come yet.

One of many channels Daniel and I have gotten into since your departure – and one that you would have particularly enjoyed, had we found it while you were still around (since it existed that far back; it’s starting to get wild to realize how many things we follow these days literally didn’t exist until after you had to go). It contains echoes of the “Natsukashii Seminar” that used to be a feature at AnimeIowa, in that it goes over series that made an impact in the decades prior to the turn of the millennium, but have essentially disappeared from memory since. Some of them are pretty obscure, too, especially to us American otaku, although with enough attention devoted to them, they might stage a comeback.

One of these was a series called The Laughing Salesman, or Warau Sērusuman, created by the same team that brought the world Doraemon. It was a take on the hoary old Faustian bargain, although from what I can tell, Moguro Fukuzou, the titular salesman, only requires that his customers use his products and offerings wisely, and under certain specified conditions – which, humans being who they are, they consistently fail at, and he punishes them severely for it. It’s very Twilight Zone-esque, and you would probably have enjoyed it as much as you would have the channel that introduced me to it.

The thing is, a live action version of this show was made at some point, late in the last millennium. It did not do well – only ten episodes were made, as far as I’ve been able to ascertain – and in fact, the episodes themselves seem to have disappeared, in much the same way that old Doctor Who episodes from the Hartnell and Troughton eras were wiped, apparently. But it’s clear from the few clips that remain that the menace of Mr. Moguro was drained from it by bringing it from the world of anime into the real world.

Now, what does this have to do with my thoughts on why we shouldn’t fear AI taking over? Well, it’s like this; looked at one way, it certainly makes sense that there’s a certain eerie quality to it. The possibility that it could take over literally everyone’s job is out there at this point, just as the idea of a robot uprising has been envisioned going back to Karl Capek’s day, when the word was first coined. But in bringing something over from the theoretical to the real, like bringing an anime to live-action, it’s entirely possible that the menace could make itself ridiculous.

I’m not saying that it will, necessarily – thus far, it’s proven to be a useful tool for many people, and may achieve the same ubiquity as word processing programs and spreadsheets have today. But there are parts of it that suggest that the transition into real-world use will have more than its share of hiccups yet, during which time we’ll be able to see behind the curtain… or if not, it will cultivate a healthy skepticism of anything and everything we see. Actually, the technology may be more like Warau Sērusuman than I intended with this illustration, as some people may push beyond the conditions that should be set for it, and face ruin because of it.

I still hope to be able to put together a few projects for and about you that will either illustrate my point or commemorate you beyond my wildest dreams (although probably not the latter, as I can dream pretty big, and I know what isn’t possible), but that’s still quite a long way off. Until then, though, honey, I’d appreciate it if you’d keep an eye on me, and wish me luck. It’s pretty obvious that I’m going to need it.