Terror
You might remember from your school days. It’s the “terror” of the blank sheet, or blank “Word document 12” on your computer screen. In school, there was an essay to write, or a report to create, or a word problem to describe. The blank page was waiting; cursor unwaveringly blinking. Waiting for you to pour out you “cogent” thoughts. Whether you exercise the “ancient art” of writing in cursive, use the more modern “qwerty” keyboard, or even dictate your thoughts to a word processor, the “terror” is still the same. You have to fill the page, and make sense, and “complete the assignment”.
Each method has its own process. I remember listening to my father as he used a “Dictaphone” for his secretary to transcribe later. “Dear John, comma” he would start, “I’m so pleased to hear of your recent promotion to Vice President, period. What a well-deserved advancement, comma, after your great deal with Proctor and Gamble, period. Give my best wishes to Barb and the kids, period. Sincerely, comma, Don”. Dictation had it owns rhythm and beat, punctuated by the “nuts and bolts” of periods and commas. I guess it was better than Dad writing on a legal pad. His poor secretary would never be able to decipher his right-handed scribble. Writing must be a genetic trait, except my scribble is left-handed making it even more obscure.
Turtle
We all learned in high school the “outline” method, first building a skeleton framework of ideas, then filling in the words and sentences. That never worked for me, even through seventy pages of my Masters thesis. As my “English 101, writing workshop” professor at Denison University, Tony Stoneburner, told me: some build a structure and hang their sentences on them, others create a shell that surrounds their thoughts, and fills the void in between.
I am a “turtle” writer, I fill the shell of the essay. My process is to just sit down and write, driven by the blinking cursor and the thoughts pressing out of my head. I find that once I begin, the words flow so quickly, that I can’t physically “write” in cursive fast enough, legible or not. Luckily my typing skills are strong. They keep up with the torrent, at least when things are going well.
Thinking
I find that writing about something is akin to thinking about it. I clarify how I consider things by describing them “on paper”. When I reach conclusions, sometimes even surprising ones, it’s part of the process of getting them “down”. Sometimes the “shell” changes as the words flow out. Once in a while, I end at a very different place than I intended when I typed the first sentence.
I am approaching 1500 essays on Our America, one thousand, five hundred times I’ve “thought through” my ideas in the past seven years. It’s almost a million and a half words, written at my desk or the kitchen table, tapped on my phone in waiting rooms or even sitting in a hospital bed, on picnic tables in campgrounds or crunched in a car seat or on hotel balconies overlooking the ocean or the pool.
And now, all of that is threatened.
Laws of Robotics
No, not MY writing: I’ll continue to trudge on unaided, except for the occasional “Google” fact check and reference to an online Thesaurus. But our science and technology is offering a whole new way of expressing thought – but not our own.
In my college days I used science fiction reading as an outlet from the intensity of courses like Nuclear Weapons Theory, Constitutional Law, and War and Revolution of the Twentieth Century. I read most of the “Robot” series by Isaac Asimov, written in the 1950’s. Asimov created a whole species of mostly humanoid robots, driven by their “positronic” minds, and governed by the “Three Laws of Robotics”.
- “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
We haven’t developed the “positronic” brain yet, and robots still look “robotic”. But we are in an era when computers can “think”. “Artificial Intelligence”, AI, has reached the stage where it can create whole essays of information at the click of a single prompt. “Create an essay about Artificial Intelligence taking the place of human writing, period”. There are available programs that can now do that, without a “human” thought, and in seconds. Pick your length and “level” of complexity.
AI
There are no “Three Laws of AI” accepted in our current science. No safeguards making sure that an eighth grader writing about the Emancipation Proclamation does the actual writing himself. Of course, teachers will still see through AI writing, for a while, because we know the abilities of our eighth graders and what they should “sound” like. But AI will “fix” that problem too. “Write a five hundred word essay on the Emancipation Proclamation at an eighth grade ‘B’ level, please”.
Yesterday, Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT, an AI essay “engine”, warned of the unlimited and unregulated future of Artificial Intelligence. There is the possibility of a “bright” future, one that changes the way people live. My concern is that the “bright” future will be that AI gets “brighter”, and we humans get “dumber”, more dependent than ever before on factors other than their own brains.
Wouldn’t that violate Asimov’s Laws? Isn’t AI dangerous, threatening mental injury to human beings? Even Sam Altman is asking for regulation, now. Without it, we may face a different kind of terror.
