All this talk about artificial intelligence is a bit unsettling.
Sure, in time, it will bring a lot of good to the world, particularly in medicines, finding and treating cancers, improving weather forecasting, eliminating boring and repetitive work, answering questions and researching data faster than humanly possible.
It also will make it easier to cheat on school homework and copy (and steal) someone else’s creative ideas, while adding to the loss of privacy, eliminating jobs and making people overly dependent on computers to manage their lives. As if smartphones and social media weren’t enough of a threat to that.
But I think all the handwringing over the risks and ills of AI, measured against all those potential future benefits, misses a tremendous immediate value to society: Political leaders could use AI to avoid stupid mistakes.
Think about it. Artificial intelligence really is pretty simple. It’s a big vacuum, sort of like a Rumba on steroids with a massive memory bank that scours every computer drive in the cloud, sorts out and catalogs the good stuff — while also sucking up the trash — into the digital equivalent of big blue recycling bins for later use.
The search-and-recall functions of an AI system can find every lousy decision by elected officials going back as far as recorded history, assuming someone wrote a book about it that a bot can read.
No doubt the list of poor choices is longer than the litany of excuses offered by students for missed homework. But if bots can solve the homework problem for millions of students, computers should be able to rescue political candidates and elected officials from their own self-inflicted mistakes.
Even better, AI will spill out recommendations that many staff members to presidents, governors and legislators would be too afraid to deliver. Bots have no emotion, no need to make their bosses look good. A bot would tell the truth that politicians need to hear.
Think of the answers AI would spit out if Donald Trump asked: “What happens if elected officials refuse to admit they lost the election and threaten to destroy democracy for their own ego?” Or, “Give me a list of people convicted for cheating on their taxes.”
Former U.S. Rep. George Santos could have asked a bot, “Please check my resume for accuracy and honesty before I post it on my campaign website?” Of course, that assignment might have overloaded the bot’s computing power.
Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who is personally holding up Senate confirmation of several hundred top-ranking members of the U.S. military, could ask his star-bangled bot, “What happens when the armed services are short-staffed and lack leadership?”
In Alaska, the fervent supporters of a large Permanent Fund dividend at the expense of other needs in our communities could ask AI to calculate the overdraft charges people would incur if they start spending the promised PFDs that never show.
Legislators — and the governor — who are reluctant to fully support public education could ask what happens to societies that fail to educate their children for jobs. And what happens to the businesses that need those new workers.
The list of possible questions for Gov. Mike Dunleavy could include: “What happens to societies that focus more on banning books, isolating people who are different, failing to adequately address education and child care and mental health needs, while putting politics above all else?”
It could drive a bot to seek counseling.
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