Super Intelligence VS Super Ignorance

Whilst watching ABC TV Breakfast on the Friday prior to the AFL Grand Final, I was staggered at the number of incessant references to Kylie Minogue performing at the pre-game entertainment. Every three or four minutes it seemed, one of the presenters would gleefully drop her name, often with a reference to their favourite Kylie song.

Good Lord, there were numerous major news stories happening all around the world that morning, but Kylie reigned supreme.

So just how many times was the singing budgie’s name dropped by the ABC Breakfast crew? I had lost count myself, but surely this was a task for an AI agent. I logged into one of the popular AI sites and posed the question. Here’s what I was informed:

“I cannot provide the exact number of times Kylie Minogue was mentioned on ABC News Breakfast on Friday morning. Live broadcast tracking logs, real-time closed-caption transcripts, and precise word-count metrics for individual daily television airings are not publicly accessible or indexed within my available data. However, her upcoming AFL Grand Final pre-game performance at the MCG has been a major focus on ABC News programs throughout the week.”

So much for AI’s hacking ability. I eventually phoned a mildly autistic friend of mine with remarkable explicit memory retrieval, who was also watching that morning. He quickly put the number of Kylie name drops at around thirty-five and favourite song references at twelve.

It’s nice to know AI has some limitations, but after all, we are only in the early days. The main area of current concern seems to be the dangers the new technology could present if its agents go rogue, something we have already seen with the recent Medibank hack.

Then again, if you believe Donald Trump in his address to the UN, AI should be renamed ‘Super Intelligence’ and we should do virtually nothing to safeguard its expansion. Needless to say, Trump has millions invested in the various AI, whoops ‘Super Intelligence’, companies and loves the fact that the billions thrown at the emerging technology have been a massive boost to the economy (and his own pocket!).

If there is such a thing as ‘Super Intelligence’, then you would assume its mortal enemy is ‘Super Ignorance’, and Trump exudes plenty of that. Earlier this year, in spruiking his plan to reduce the cost of pharmaceuticals, he boasted the he would be bringing the drug prices down “not thirty of forty per cent, which would be great…we’re going to get them down one thousand per cent, six hundred percent, five hundred percent, fifteen hundred percent…”. The mathematics are absurd but the MAGA crowd are still cheering.

Just how AI is going to impact the education system is anybody’s guess. Already schools throughout the world are discouraging students from going straight to AI providers to seek solutions or solve their homework problems. How times have changed. Back in the 1960s, in Australia and throughout the western world, door to door encyclopaedia salesmen were a common sight.

They would descend on suburban areas attempting to sell families what were then very expensive sets of encyclopaedias. Their modus operandi was to prey on parent’s desire to provide the best education for their kids. In reality they signed up for a set of fancy looking volumes that would sit on their living room shelves, largely ignored by their kids and falsely anointed as a font of worldly information. It seems ludicrous now that a twelve-volume set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica could compete with the memory of a massive data centre.

Finally, I am wondering whether AI will ever develop what we might call a malicious sense of humour with its agents deviating from so called community standards, simply for the sake of a good chuckle. The internet is currently littered with jokes and memes about Trump’s supposed incontinence and emission of foul smells in polite company. So, what does Super Intelligence have to say?

“Jokes and rumours regarding Donald Trump’s alleged incontinence and use of adult diapers have circulated widely across social media and late-night television, though there is no official or verified evidence to support the claims.” 

It then goes on to repeat some of those ‘diaper Don’ jokes, adding a rejoinder about the serious issues surrounding incontinence – noting that it’s not a laughing matter. Ironically many of the internet visual memes, which mock Trump’s lack of bowel control in the grossest of ways, have been generated using AI.

It’s all very confusing and I doubt that even Alvin Toffler, if he was still alive today, would dare forecast what the future holds with this barnstorming technology. Perhaps we might even see the evolution of a new energy sapping data centre that perpetuates ‘Super Ignorance’ and the stuff of so many political mantras today – like the collective thoughts of Pauline Hanson. No Trump poo jokes allowed but plenty of populist bullshit and a readily accessible religious experience that promotes ignorance as bliss!